A Revolutionary's “Stravaganza”: Police and Morality in the Habsburg Empire (1780–1830)

Abstract

During the era following the Enlightenment, the police became the main institution to oversee the maintenance of public order in many European cities. Their activities also shaped the idea of public order and public morality. The police were important in the context of political change and perceived “threat of revolution” but also in other areas, including the control of movement and residence. From the end of the eighteenth century, criminal codes were changing, and in the Habsburg monarchy, these changes included the definition of a new category of less grave “police delicts.” This study compares police norms and practice in the period of 1790–1830. Using several concrete examples, the author investigates whether the approach of the police and the authorities to moral offenses changed in connection with social and political developments (reaction to revolutions, restoration, changes in the influence of the Church). The aim of the study is to analyze whether the Habsburg police, in an era of more liberal legislation, played a similar restrictive role in the area of moral offenses as they did in controlling political activities.

In the era following the Enlightenment, the police became the main institution of oversight of public order in many towns and cities. This new ambition on the part of the police, as well as the tasks it was supposed to fulfill in implementing the political agenda in each of the Habsburg Empire's individual lands following the War of the Second Coalition, is reflected in texts published in the Deutsche Justiz- und Polizey-Fama journal. The first issue of this journal was published by Theodor Konrad Hartleben, former director of the Salzburg police, in early 1802. In the introduction, he outlined the situation in European states in dark colors intended to help justify the need for police expertise, international information sharing, and the police in general. Hartleben was an advocate of enlightened conservativism: he acknowledged the importance of the state in overcoming the “barbarism” of earlier times (such as religious intolerance), but rejected revolution, which he blamed—much like wars—for destabilization of social values and disorder in households.¹ He still viewed religion as an important element contributing to the maintenance of the state and believed that the police should never make the mistake of assuming that “a non-believer could be an obedient, enlightened, and moral part of the state.”²

Complaints about a decay of morals in (post)revolutionary times were something of a leitmotif in Hartleben's journal. Among the particular branches of the police, he mentions a special “morality police” (Sittenpolizei) but does not define it in his editorial, only stressing that the relevant directives (Sittenordnungen) should be drawn up by people with practical experience and knowledge of the population. In the first year of the journal, he published reports on things such as alcohol consumption, dancing and balls, gambling, and fashion and cosmetics in a column on “morality police.”³

The aim of this study is to investigate how the police in the post-revolutionary Habsburg monarchy, and especially in Bohemia, worked toward maintaining the traditional political and social order and how it participated in the establishment of new, secular morals. I will offer a more detailed characterization and illustration of this morality using illicit sexual behavior as an example, which was no longer classified as a capital offense and was increasingly placed under the jurisdiction of the police and the state administration. But the enlightened relaxation of penalties set by criminal law did not necessarily translate into greater public acceptance of such sexual behavior (prostitution, same-sex acts). On the contrary, this previously taboo topic could now become the subject of public moral condemnation.⁴ In the Habsburg monarchy, the modern police were created during the enlightened reforms, but after the French Revolution they turned into protectors of the established political order. Moreover, public debate on issues of sexual morality was not well developed at the time. In the following, I will therefore examine the claim that Austrian police maintained public order and to some extent public morality but did not help create a secular moral order in the spirit of Enlightenment or bourgeois ideology.⁵

With this in mind, I shall examine the connections between theoretical treatments, norms, and guidelines pertaining to this subject on the one hand and police practice on the other hand. Administrative documents (correspondence, reports on surveillance and investigation) also enable us to explore the language used by police officials to describe “immoral” behavior even before it was classified by the courts. To some extent, such sources also suggest the views of the persons who were being prosecuted—by recording their confrontation with the police force. I shall try to establish whether the image of public morality, as codetermined by the police and other authorities (government officials, censors), corresponded to the written norms, and investigate what other normative notions—including gender norms—it reflected, and how this image related to the idea of good citizenship.

Although most reports in Hartleben's Justiz- und Polizey-Fama were from the German lands, the journal covered more than the territories of the slowly deteriorating Holy Roman Empire. The first issues of the journal were dedicated to Johann Anton Pergen, creator of the Austrian police organization and a long-time police minister. Vienna and Austria in general—which Hartleben included among the German states—are praised in his introduction as examples of good police organization and models of monarchic concern for this branch of state administration.⁶

Hartleben's praise for Pergen's policing had some justification. In the Habsburg monarchy, police reforms had been underway since about the 1770s. The creation of a police directorate (Oberpolizeidirektion) in Vienna in 1782 was followed in 1785–87 by the establishment of police directorates in the capitals of other lands in the monarchy (including Prague, Brno/Brünn, Opava/Troppau, Graz, Innsbruck, Linz).⁷ After some initial clarification of its powers, the organizational structure of the police stabilized by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and Pergen was at its helm for some years. Unlike Joseph Sonnenfels, for instance, Pergen was a dedicated advocate of a narrower conception of the police, one that did not include healthcare or social care. He also used the threat presented by the French Revolution to strengthen the secret police, whose mission gradually crystallized into the protection of the state system,⁸ but he in no way neglected the development of the public police, which included a large part of the morality police.

In the theoretical writings of Johann Heinrich Gottlob Justi and Sonnenfels, founders of the theory of the state in the German-speaking area (Polizeywissenschaft), we find no specific reference to morality police. Yet Justi does mention concrete measures aimed at supervision of morals, such as repression of brothels. It is important to note that he links transgressions against morality with public spaces.⁹ Like Justi, Sonnenfels believed that religion plays a crucial role in the maintenance of morality, but in his conception of the preservation of morals he also included children's education and upbringing, science, censorship, matters pertaining to servants, and even the theater. It was to this broadly defined area that he devoted the next phase of his professional life.¹⁰ In his view, supervision of morality meant prevention of behaviors harmful or damaging to the person, honor, or possessions of individual citizens (innere Privatsicherheit). Under Sonnenfels's influence, one of his students, Joseph Butschek, later a professor of the theory of state at the Prague university, also wrote about “morals” in the general sense in the 1770s.¹¹ Some later theorists of law nevertheless drew a distinction between morality and law in a Kantian spirit, for instance Franz von Zeiller, coauthor of both the criminal code of 1803/04 and, above all, of the General Civil Code (ABGB, 1811). According to Zeiller, immoral behavior (Laster) may harm the spiritual and physical powers of individuals, but the law should intervene only in cases when such behavior also affects others.¹² However, as it pertains to “acts against morality” falling under police jurisdiction, this negative impact could consist of something like giving a bad example or leading to imitation, which is why the public nature of such behaviors was of such importance.

Johann Jakob Reismann von Riesenberg, the first director of police in Prague, had studied with Butschek before his appointment. Although, according to both Pergen and Emperor Joseph II, he did not do well in the position and was recalled after just one year,¹³ the establishment of independent police directorates in the regional capitals of the Habsburg monarchy represented an important step also toward morality policing. Another milestone came with the adoption of Joseph II's criminal code in 1787. In addition to enlightened changes such as the abolition of the death penalty, the code also defined some offenses as “political delicts” (politische Verbrechen). These were not, as the terminology might seem to indicate, acts aimed against the existing political establishment or the ruler—those remained in the most serious category of “criminal felonies”—but lighter transgressions. They were still judged by the courts, but this separate definition may have contributed to the perception that the police were the proper body to investigate them.¹⁴

Alongside behaviors posing a danger to life, health, or possessions of fellow citizens, this group of less grave offenses included “offenses leading to the corruption of morals” (Verbrechen, die zum Verderbnisse der Sitten führen).¹⁵ These comprised religious delicts (casting doubt on religion, blasphemy), delicts broadly linked to sexuality, but also, for instance, wearing of masks outside of designated occasions, membership of secret societies, and possession of forbidden images and books. Even the operation of brothels, soliciting, and prostitution were thus classified as “political delicts.” Homosexual acts met with a strict but nonreligious condemnation,¹⁶ and their reclassification from a criminal category into this less severe one in effect meant a reduction of punishment. A sentence was likely to be stricter if the homosexual behavior caused “public outrage.” Even common fornication (Unzucht) was only to be prosecuted if it took place in public. In general, it is fair to state that in the Josephinian criminal code, most transgressions against morals were characterized by their “public” nature.

The category of moral delicts received special attention not only in the Habsburg criminal code issued in 1787 but also in earlier projects of police organization and in police manuals. The creation of a police force in the Habsburg monarchy was influenced not only by Justi's and Sonnenfels's theory of state, but significantly also by practical examples from other countries, especially France.¹⁷ A detailed report about the Paris police, commissioned by the Viennese court in 1769–71, may have originally been intended only for its own internal use, but was eventually published in a German translation in 1790.¹⁸ Among the main areas of activity for police commissioners, the report lists religion first and morals (Sitten) second, with the latter term covering a wide range of issues from theater, immoral prints and pasquils (meaning satire and caricatures), and (even) brothels.¹⁹ Because Viennese officials explicitly asked about prostitutes in Paris, the report contains a separate chapter on the subject.²⁰ It portrays prostitution as a necessary, ineradicable evil, which the police regulate to ensure that it causes no public outrage or indignation and that no young, previously honest, women fall into its snares. This toleration is legitimized by reference to greater evils which it helps prevent: the Parisian police were apparently using prostitutes as informers who were supposed to report all customers who might be involved in “conspiracies and assaults . . . on public peace” or in other crimes, as well as suspect and harmful persons in general.²¹

In the Habsburg monarchy, a repressive attitude to prostitution and “immoral” behavior in general, as described and prescribed by the Austrian criminal code, was also integrated in the less authoritative norms of recommended police practice. In fact, the term “practice” appears in the name of a contemporary manual, Die Polizei praktisch, written by Andreas Chrysogonus Eichler and first published in 1794 in Prague.²² Later editions (1803, 1808, and 1815) responded not only to readers’ changing interests but also to changes in legislation, especially the adoption of a new Austrian criminal code in 1803/04. This manual was in effect an extensive excerpt from laws but also less authoritative regulations, some of which went back to the second half of the eighteenth century. This was combined with the foundations of police theory on the prevention of accidents and undesirable situations. The manual also reflected changes in the legal treatment of “fornication.” In the 1793 edition, fornication was simply banned, while in the 1815 edition, its various forms, including prostitution and procurement, are classified as “political delicts,” and prosecution of prostitution is treated as the responsibility of the police. Regarding the actus reus of prostitution and procurement, as well as penalties which these acts carried, later editions of Eichler's manual copied the criminal code of 1803/04.²³ The manual did not, however, provide concrete guidelines for actual police work in towns.

Thanks at least in part to his authorship of successive editions of his police manual, Eichler was appointed in 1799 to the post of first chief commissioner (Oberkommissar), which was the second-highest office in the Prague police force after police director.²⁴ A similar career path from lower commissioner posts at the Prague police directorate awaited Johann Konrad, author of various treatises for and on the police in addition to other literary texts. After his work Die Polizeyverfassung oder Theorie, Praxis und Geschichte der Polizey appeared in 1817, Konrad, who was at the time studying law, was appointed second chief commissioner of the Prague police.²⁵ The full title of his treatise indicates that his Polizeyverfassung was intended to be a larger opus but it seems that only the first, theoretical part was ever published.²⁶ Still, it is worth noting how much space in his work Konrad devoted to morals and their supervision, especially given that he held an important post with the Prague police in the late 1810s and early 1820s. His name even figures in some of the cases discussed below.

According to Konrad, morality—or rather ethical life (Sittlichkeit)—enables citizens of the state to achieve their purpose, which is happiness (Glückseligkeit). Konrad makes a distinction between internal and external morality and between internal and external morality police. The former is based on internal attitudes and rests on two pillars: religion and education. These are also the areas which were outside the scope of police work but at which relevant measures and institutions were directed. (The notion of religion playing a constitutive role in the state was emphasized not only by Hartleben but also by Eichler in the introduction to his manual.²⁷) External morality is demonstrated by a person's behavior toward himself and other citizens; behavior which detracts from or destroys happiness is perceived as immoral. A person can harm himself by “darkening his reason” (Verdunkelung des Verstandes), for instance through astrology or by treasure hunting, or by irrational or passionate gratification of sensuality at the expense of reason, heart, or body—and this is where Konrad placed fornication. In relation to others, external morality can be violated by immoral speech, gestures, or actions, but also by denying help to those who need it. External morality may also be jeopardized by games and entertainments that inflame sensuality and imagination, suppress subtle feelings, or incite passions. Among preventive measures recommended in this chapter we find, not surprisingly, the supervision of public places. Konrad also proposes that dissolute and profligate persons should be declared “legally dead,” that is, they should be stripped of their civil rights. In the second part of the book, the dispersion of clandestine meetings and corrective punishment of dissolute persons are added to the list of preventive measures.²⁸ Konrad's interpretation thus went beyond Zeiller's separation of individual morals and the law. In his view, police were supposed to be active even in the inner sphere, that is, areas where the behavior of an individual did not affect other persons and jeopardized only the individual concerned.

Konrad's book was mentioned favorably in Hartleben's Justiz-, Kameral- und Polizeifama.²⁹ It also received several other reviews, some of which criticized Konrad for failing to offer a narrower definition of the police. And indeed, Konrad's definition included the supervision of a vast range of human activities, even to the point of becoming identical with state authority as such, which reviewers felt was an outdated approach.³⁰ This broad concept of police may have reflected the practice of the Prague directorate: for instance, the portfolio of commissioner Konrad in 1814 included preliminary investigation of crimes but also a commentary on regular police reports from regional authorities and the Prague magistrate and various issues related to construction and small commerce in Prague.³¹

The division of powers between the commissioners of Prague's police directorate from early 1814 also included the categorization of issues of morals ranging from brothels, prostitution, and procurement, all the way to non-permitted dancing, drunkenness, and public excesses as permanent areas of police activity.³² The extent to which the police adhered to this narrower definition of its activities in accordance with Zeiller's interpretation, as well as the degree to which it also interfered either preventively or in cases where individuals endangered only themselves, can only be shown in concrete cases of police investigation. In the following section, I discuss three such cases. These cases admittedly do not cover the full range of police activities; they capture varying degrees of detail, and they are not evenly distributed within our time period of interest, 1790–1830. Nonetheless, they are illuminating.

*

A significant moral dimension clearly characterized the first public excess of note that the Prague police had to deal with—the “brothel riots” in December 1793.³³ It started with an attack on a brothel in the Prague Old Town that was the culmination of verbal disagreements between the brothel staff and students of the Prague university. The unrest lasted for several days and became increasingly heated. The riots developed their own dynamics and were later joined, partly out of curiosity, by up to several thousand persons. Looting and attacks against other brothels and houses of brothel keepers in both the New and the Old Town of Prague continued for several days.

The President of the Gubernium Lažanský criticized Police President La Moth for neglecting the affair and only belatedly reporting on it. La Moth was moreover derided by the students and the mob for alleged links to the prostitutes and madams and for protecting them. Viennese Police Minister Pergen addressed similar criticism about Prague's reactions to the unrest, saying that the police had not only been careless but by sending the watch to the brothel they created the impression that they were less interested in maintaining public order than in protecting the “corrupt whores” (feile Dirnen). He complained, “[i]t would seem that the residents of Prague in general believe that the police give prostitutes more protection than the moral part of citizens would wish, and that they are not merely suffered but given preferential treatment.”³⁴

Even a brief look at subsequent steps taken by the police shows that the prostitutes were not treated with any undue laxity. While the detained students were soon released and a gubernial commission to investigate the attacks against brothels was set up much later, on 15 February 1794, the detained prostitutes and brothel keepers had been under investigation for their “dissolute way of life” and “procurement and facilitation of fornication” since late December 1793.³⁵

Although the investigation and the courts could not quite deny the guilt of the violent students, official records show the efforts of the authorities to excuse the behavior by referring to the students’ “immature and incorrect understanding of offended honor.”³⁶ Jan Theobald Held, witness to the riots and later an important physician in Prague, noted that the attacks were motivated by “the offended and outraged moral feelings of the youths.”³⁷ The students themselves appealed in their defense to moral outrage and this was reflected also in students’ ditties which targeted the allegedly close links between the police and prostitution. Official German Prague newspapers, on the other hand, reported in a moderate tone on mere disagreements that had led to a partial destruction of some “dens of lewdness,” and suggested that peace-loving locals, much to their credit, had not participated in these events, having at most watched them with abhorrence from their windows.³⁸

Moral indignation over prostitution, especially over the fact that prostitutes could occupy the public space like any other citizen and thus claim for instance the right to police protection from immediate threat, was a sentiment voiced by the students in their defense. Various official reports as well as journal articles seem to share this feeling. Gubernial councillors (in effect members of the Bohemian government) did not, however, appear to grant this right to moral indignation to rioters from the lower social classes: they believed that apprentices and servants (“the mob”) were motivated in their rioting not by moral outrage but by their desire to loot.³⁹

This publicly declared negative view of prostitution seems to be one of the key features of morality of the new bourgeois society, and unlike the apprentices and young craftspeople, students, regardless of their urban or rural origin, at least potentially belonged to this newly forming society. Despite their contacts with prostitution, or even their use of the services, the authorities viewed students as having the potential of moral and social improvement. After all, moral self-perfection without external guidance was constitutive of the ideal citizen, an enlightened man. The police and administration helped shape this ideal by protecting the students and the population in general from negative influences.

The Prague “brothel riots” of 1793/94 also display some other symptoms of bourgeois society's distinctive, social or class-related, attitude toward prostitution as a “necessary evil,” as Peter Becker has demonstrated in his study of nineteenth-century criminologists. Tolerance of prostitution was supported more than it was opposed as it was supposed to prevent even more undesirable phenomena, such as breakdowns of marriages or masturbation. The use of prostitution was also generally tolerated for men of the lower classes who lacked the requisite education and internal moral regulation to control their sexual instincts—they were viewed as incapable of moral self-perfection.⁴⁰

The object of these enlightened/bourgeois repressive and regulatory, but also educative and cultivating, activities were, above all, men. Women played a rather marginal role. This was apparent in Prague during the events of 1793/94, although women were active participants in the riots and one can follow their subsequent defenses and pleas for release from forced labor from their own perspective. Prostitutes and madams were moreover targets of moral condemnation, which further contributed to their gender-based marginality. This added to the ambivalence with which locals and police minister Pergen perceived the efforts of the Prague police, who tried to de-escalate the conflict and protect the prostitutes—like any other citizens—from the anger of the mob. But we should not consider this a feature of modernity, due to the fact that protection of the weaker participants of unequal social (and sexual) relations or victims of abuse was not viewed as the task of the police for a long time to come.

*

The police and the courts investigated and discussed moral offenses, both the less severe “political” and the criminal ones, behind closed doors. This meant that the public and the media never learned what really went on in there. A handful of remarks in the newspapers, and sometimes behaviors and reactions reported by the police, are insufficient to allow any confident conclusions regarding the prevailing attitude of the population of Prague (or any other place) to morality and what was genuinely perceived as immoral.

In the Habsburg monarchy, we nonetheless find a critique of immorality—or rather, moral and sexual transgressions—based on enlightened rather than simply traditional ideas. Specifically, associations were made between these phenomena and the “degenerate” members of both the higher social classes who could act with impunity and the deformed environment of the Catholic Church. Examples of such criticism can be found in a two-part treatise provocatively called Forbidden Writings (Verbotene Schriften), published anonymously in Straubing in 1805, which attracted the attention of the Austrian and Prague authorities. In the chapter “Love and Lust” (Liebe und Wollust), a person who succumbs to his instincts and passions is presented as lowering himself to the level of animals, while ideal human nature is said to be based on the cultivation of passions and lust by reason in the direction of morality. One element of the critique, namely a reduction of women to the subject of such passions, is implicitly aimed against prostitution but also against prostitutes.⁴¹ In a chapter on the “Culture of Vice” (Kultur des Lasters), the critique targets the social environment that hides this cultivated immorality under a guise of nobility, artificiality, and hypocrisy, just as prostitutes do.⁴²

In a chapter of the second volume called “Abuse of Boys” (Knabenschändung), the author describes the environment of moral depravity in more detail when he speaks of the sexual abuse of boys and young men (using the term “Päderastie”) as being the most unnatural and most despicable of vices. Its perpetrators are said to be “cowardly, ignorant men of weak character, arrogant rich good-for-nothings, scoundrels from the ranks of aristocracy.”⁴³ In a supplement to this chapter, the author anonymously charges six nobles with this vice: Baron A., a canon, commits pederasty (in elegant society). Count B. is hand in glove with representatives of the justice system who managed to sweep under the rug a charge brought against him by a hussar whom he kept as his “Maitresse.” Baron C. seduces students using his library full of most scandalous engravings and pays them large sums of money to keep quiet. Count D. seduces boys in the streets, in theaters, and in the ditches, for which he “often receives a harsh beating.” A fellow libertine, another Baron C. is “a big patriot in speech, a hunter of Jacobins, and a police spy.” Count F. also abuses boys: he exemplifies an idiot in a high office.⁴⁴ In addition to hypocrisy of the high society and the courts, the author also criticizes the police for its inaction, claiming that “with all its secret informers [it] overlooks these despicable crimes against humanity, while claiming to sniff out crimes against the state in passing words and fleeting opinions.”⁴⁵

From a semantic perspective, it is worth noting that all homosexual intercourse had been previously defined as acts aimed against humankind/humanity (Menschheit) in the Austrian legal code of 1787. The term “pederasty” was then used by the author of the Forbidden Writings in the sense of an unequal homosexual act, regardless of whether the inequality had to do with legal stipulation regarding age, social differences, or economic status.⁴⁶

When in 1809 the Forbidden Writings appeared in a second edition, the Police Ministry (Polizeihofstelle) and the Bohemian Gubernium launched a search for their author, which led them to Amand Berghofer, a writer with a checkered past and at the time a censor in Prague.⁴⁷ Hints to his identity were found in similarities between some textual content and Berghofer's life. Berghofer, a Catholic, was separated from his (second) wife and in a relationship with another woman. In several chapters of the second volume of his work, he discusses the subject of divorce, or rather voices a criticism of the indissolubility of (unhappy) marriage in Church and civil law. The author argues that this is a counterpart to the “unnatural” Catholic command of celibacy, for which nature revenges itself with fornication and destructive passions of those who deny human nature.⁴⁸ Berghofer presents Catholic Italy as an illustration of a morally degenerated country, supposedly having produced castrati, pederasts, physical “half-people,” moral invalids, as well as the most shameful monster of the inquisition.

Not surprisingly, the Prague police investigated Berghofer on suspicion of authorship of the Forbidden Writings. In early March 1810, Chief Commissioner Johann Konrad, mentioned above in connection with his writings on the police, interrogated him. Berghofer denied writing a larger part of the work and explained its similarity with his own views or previous texts by claiming that he often shared his opinions with various persons active in the literary world. This was apparently also the case of the chapter on abuse of boys (Knabenschändung), where Berghofer noted that he used to discuss the “shameful vice of pederasty” with censor Procházka. In conclusion, under interrogation he defended life in partnership, parenting outside marriage, and he made references to extramarital relationships among higher aristocracy and the hypocritical double standard applied by the state depending on the class of the offender.⁴⁹ With these statements, Berghofer in effect admitted to authorship of the remaining parts of the Forbidden Writings.

In Berghofer's view, outdated formal unions, institutions, and customs must give way to nature, cultivated by human reason and heart. Maternal love predestines women to bringing up their children, while love between partners—and not the institution of marriage—legitimizes sexuality. An affection-based but also fundamentally unequal relationship of this kind is naturally possible only between a man and a woman. Relationships based solely on lust, or even abuse of social or economic power, are despicable vices that weaken and degrade persons who engage in them to the level of animal. The state, including the courts and the police, nevertheless often tolerate such behavior by people of high status. Berghofer thus criticizes the police for covering up pederasty, which it ought to prosecute. Not only his life but also his views on partnership and sexuality seem to justify the label “the Austrian Rousseau,” which is what Wieland, a German Enlightenment writer, allegedly called Berghofer.⁵⁰

Although the police in its institutional form was the result of enlightened reforms, in Berghofer's eyes it stood on the side of the “old regime,” only partially due to its reputation for being a corrupt protector of the mighty, which is what Prague students in 1793 derided it for. A radical, although not egalitarian, romanticizing image of relations between the sexes necessarily challenged traditional social institutions, such as the indissolubility of marriage or celibacy, and with them the authorities who were supposed to safeguard those institutions. Although Wurzbach's lexicon called Berghofer—probably in part due to his lifestyle—an “eccentric” (Sonderling), he in fact embodied the Romantic idea of the superiority of feeling and reason over social conventions. This ideal led to the development of the no less normative ideology of a complementary bourgeois couple of a man and a woman, or family, as the foundation of society.⁵¹ What is important from our perspective is that from this point onwards, it was not only the criminal code but also this fundamentally secular ideology that formed the background of moral condemnation of extramarital sexuality as a selfish behavior oriented merely at individual pleasure and reducing a person to a body. In addition to oversight of a broad range of behaviors on the verge of criminal acts, the police were thus asked to suppress (and no longer tolerate) behaviors incompatible with this new view of humanity. It is unsurprising that in this context, “humanity” was taken to mean above all men, and that this attitude was manifest in official and public views of prostitution.

From a moral perspective, Berghofer also criticized the secret police, or rather the fact that they used spies and informers—whose motives were despicable and who came from the lowest class of society—against noble-minded people. Citizens were thus incited against citizens, which corrupted their morals.⁵² Berghofer even claimed that the increasing numbers and growing powers of police spies were the cause of subjects’ mistrust of the state, of unrest and revolutions. He called upon governments to permit freedom of opinion and expression. This was an appeal that of itself attracted the attention of the police and censors in 1810. The Austrian authorities naturally did not act on Berghofer's recommendations during the Coalition Wars with France, much less after the defeat of Napoleon. On the other hand, the negative light in which author Charles Sealsfield and others portrayed the secret police as an instrument of Metternich's despotism was less a faithful depiction of reality than just part and parcel of the hyperbolic pamphlet style of his fictional travel diary though Austria.⁵³

*

The important role of the secret police in the political establishment of Europe and more generally its development after 1814/15 have been investigated in detail elsewhere⁵⁴ and is not the subject of this text. Nevertheless, the secret police was oftentimes not separate from the police as such, i.e., from the public police in terms of personnel. The following case is of interest for our subject also because in it, the political and moral aspects intersect. This also brings us to the “Stravaganza” referred to in the title of this study. The case is interesting not only from the general point of view of policing morality, but also because it provides a hitherto unknown and unique insight into the life of the Italian exile in the 1820s. Let us therefore take a closer look at it.

Luigi Arcovito and Gabriele Pedrinelli arrived in Prague from Italy in September 1821. They did not come of their own free will: for six moderate leaders of the Neapolitan revolution of 1820–21, several towns in the Austrian monarchy (alongside Prague also Brno/Brünn and Graz) were designated as places of exile. The details of the Prague stay for these two former generals are known to us thanks to police surveillance.⁵⁵ While Arcovito's behavior was exemplary and after about a year he was moved to Austrian Trieste and then further to Tuscany, Pedrinelli settled in Prague, set up a distillery, considered purchase of a house, and established numerous social contacts. The police used some of Pedrinelli's contacts not only to check whether he was trying to spread revolutionary ideas but also to exert pressure on him and force him to leave. This was because in October 1823, the emperor Franz I issued a directive according to which all persons who had in some way participated in revolutionary movements were supposed to leave the territory of the Austrian Empire. Pedrinelli, however, did not want to leave. Quite the opposite: he did his utmost to prolong his stay in Prague.

According to Czech historian Josef Polišenský, who was one of the few to deal with these sources, the police reports contained no information about Pedrinelli's political activities, and seemed suited at best “for the history of morals and as a testament to the low level of the care exercised by Metternich's Austria to defend what they called ‘decency.’”⁵⁶ Johann Constantin Lorensi, a passport official of the Prague police directorate and author of most reports on Pedrinelli, focused his surveillance of Pedrinelli's contacts not only on members of the Prague Italian community, merchants, and bankers, but especially his housekeeper and other persons from the lower classes, such as apprentices and servants, who were in regular contact with the Neapolitan former general. Reports from 1823 gradually reveal various secrets and suspicions, while seeming to keep the reader in suspense. Naturally, this may have been the policeman's strategy, a way of convincing his superiors about his tireless effort and indispensability.⁵⁷ And it is moreover possible that Lorensi's conclusions were simply wrong.

In early March 1823, Lorensi wrote about two tinsmith apprentices who were supposed to be helping with operation of Pedrinelli's distillery. The roughly sixteen-year-old Joachim Lonner even lived in Pedrinelli's house and apparently had close relations with him. The other boy, Braun, was said to give the impression of “very wild morals.”⁵⁸ Pedrinelli apparently paid for his food, lodgings, gave him pocket money, and walked with him around Prague, but he also allegedly asked both boys not to share confidences with their peers.⁵⁹ In May 1823, Lorensi informed the head of Prague police about the poor health of both apprentices: Braun was supposed to have some problems with movement and make an apathetic impression, which—Lorensi hinted—“could lead to the discovery of important facts.”⁶⁰ In June 1823, the cause of these complaints came to light: a certain doctor Nushardt treated, apparently with success, both the two boys and Pedrinelli for syphilis, which he did not see as in any way extraordinary.⁶¹ Lonner and Braun then left Pedrinelli's service and his house. Lorensi started uncovering the nature of their relationship with the former general about a month later, when he convinced Braun to speak to him about at least some part of what had transpired. According to Braun, Lonner had from the start been Pedrinelli's “darling” (Liebling): he often stayed with Pedrinelli alone in the room and the general gave him plenty of money.⁶² Lorensi failed to convince the apprentices to share any more information with him, so he turned to other people around the Italian exile: a washerwoman, who often stayed around his house, testified about his contacts with prostitutes and was convinced that he “also corrupted the boy [Lonner] since given his manners, it cannot have been otherwise.”⁶³

After the summer of 1823, Pedrinelli with a few exceptions stopped his contacts with young men. From time to time, he saw Braun but otherwise “no one of that ilk” was visiting him. It apparently took Lorensi some time to acquire another piece of evidence. He found it in the environment hinted at by the previous findings: in the world of prostitution. Midwife Maria Nedwied and her sister-in-law Theresia Chalaupkin recounted in their statement for the police, taken in late November 1823, something they had heard from an acquaintance, Lisette Wowes, a prostitute. Wowes, they said, claimed that Pedrinelli tried to convince her in his apartment to have sexual intercourse with him “in the manner of pederasts,” which she refused. With another woman, he allegedly did have anal and oral sex and thereby “ruined her.” Wowes supposedly also learned that Pedrinelli also “uses [men] in this way.” One such person, a very handsome tinsmith apprentice apparently personally told her as much, adding that he paid for it with his health when he became infected and had to be treated by doctor Nushardt.⁶⁴

The above-mentioned commissioner Konrad, who was recording the statements of the two women, shortly thereafter presented a report about this and the whole investigation of Pedrinelli's “immoral way of life” to Josef Hoch, the new police director of Prague.⁶⁵ He supported his claim “that Pedrinelli is devoted to pederasty and practices this way of sexual intercourse with women too is notoriously known among all servants of Venus” with testimonies from several prostitutes. In his reproduction of Marie Nedwied's testimony, he called Pedrinelli's actions an “outrage” and spoke about “victims of his lust.”

Police director Hoch in his subsequent report for the president of the Bohemian Gubernium used similar terms. The report contained descriptions of Pedrinelli's contacts with the Prague Italian community and other foreigners, mentioned the fact that the former general renounced all political activity, but above all focused on the results of surveillance conducted in consequence of suspicion of the “vice of pederasty.” Surveillance was complicated by the fact that Pedrinelli tried his best to keep these “nefarious deeds” secret. In his report that Pedrinelli was having intercourse with female prostitutes in a similarly “unnatural manner,” it is unclear whether what was meant by “pederasty” was sexual intercourse with (young) men as such or, as seems more likely, a particular sexual practice. But be that as it may, Hoch had to wait a while for an answer to his question as to whether he should report this to a criminal court or merely caution Pedrinelli against such behaviors.⁶⁶ What police minister Sedlnitzky wanted above all was for Pedrinelli to leave the Austrian lands, yet it apparently never occurred to him that he could use the Italian's moral weakness as a tool to make him do so. When in late January 1824, he was responding to reports about Pedrinelli's “immoral and illegal behavior,” he left the decision whether to bring him to court for the “crime of unnatural formication” up to the President of the Gubernium. Still, he implicitly expressed his support for prosecution when he wrote that there is no reason to “try to divert punitive justice from its legal course.”⁶⁷

In the meantime, the Prague police continued its surveillance. Lorensi was trying to find whether Pedrinelli, after conducting his “harmful experiment” on Lonner, would try to seduce other people around him to “sodomite sins.” In the case of Pedrinelli's new twenty-year-old tinsmith apprentice, Daniel Tietens from Hamburg, he thought it unlikely because Tietens was said to be an ill-favored youth of limited intelligence who might easily blurt something out. A cartwright apprentice called Král, however, was allegedly offered money for “letting Pedrinelli do with his body what he pleased.” Král not only rejected this offer but told other apprentices and his girlfriend about it, and then left for Silesia. Lorensi had high hopes that when Král returned to Prague, his testimony could serve as a further proof of Pedrinelli's “dissolute lifestyle.”⁶⁸

In the second half of January 1824 Pedrinelli tried to have his stay in Prague extended, going as far as to appeal to the emperor. In a letter to the emperor, he tried to dispel any suspicion of revolutionary inclinations, arguing that his short-lived misguided engagement in 1799—when “demagogical ideas” (meaning the Neapolitan Republic) were reaching their peak—had been forgiven by the rulers of Naples, as evidenced by the fact that Pedrinelli had been reinstated in his various functions. Otherwise, Pedrinelli had always been—in his own words—mainly a soldier. He had accepted public functions only in an effort to protect the local population, as was the case, for instance, in 1821 when as a governor he had handed Naples over to the Austrian army without a fight. He claimed that in Prague, his intention was to contribute, by establishing a distillery (for which he had received a license under an assumed name), to the development of this industry. In short, Pedrinelli was trying to present himself not as a foreigner forced to reside abroad, a person targeted by measures against idleness or revolutionary thoughts, but as someone who has behaved like a respectable Bohemian subject throughout his entire stay in Prague.⁶⁹

The emperor Franz I was not swayed. In the end, even police minister Sedlnitzky changed his view on what should be done to make Pedrinelli quit the town and the country. This can be assumed from the steps taken by the Prague police, who did not formally charge the former general for transgressions against morals but used his behavior to pressure him. On 4 February 1824, Johann Lorensi turned up at Pedrinelli's apartment and accused him of committing “excesses most strictly prohibited here,” which, he said, placed him in danger of criminal prosecution. Although we only have the German report in our hands, the confrontation apparently took place in Italian. It was in effect the culmination of Lorensi's long-term efforts, which is why he described it in his report in relative detail. While aware of the limitations of this source, we can reconstruct what transpired as follows:⁷⁰

Pedrinelli (with visible signs of embarrassment and dismay): “I'm not sure I understand what you mean because the word you are using, ‘extravagance’⁷¹ (stravaganza) has a very broad meaning.”

Lorensi: “What I mean and what you are charged with are unnatural excesses in love, taking pleasure with boys and girls, which here—and probably in any country where the state oversees morals and people's wellbeing—are perceived and punished as gross, criminal transgressions.”

Pedrinelli: “Dear God, I never thought I would ever in my life find myself in a situation where I would have to listen to something like this. This is for me most shameful, dishonorable, but it happened! And I can be brought to court for this?”

Lorensi: “That is the case. And those charges are so strong you won't be able to avoid investigation.”

Pedrinelli: “Oh, my Savior, what a shame! I used to have somewhat close contact with girls from time to time, but that, I believe, is not forbidden. But with boys, no, I was never involved with boys.”

Lorensi: “Dear sir, it isn't my task to investigate this affair, only to inform you about it. That's why I cannot discuss it with you. I'd only like to ask you to carefully consider my words, so you won't realize just how serious this is only when it's too late.”

Pedrinelli: “Strange. You must admit that if someone entertains the kind of thoughts you are talking about here, that person would surely call upon some third person to serve as a witness to what allegedly happened. How could someone be convicted of such act if the testimony of the other party is not enough to counter the accused person's denial? So, tell me, please, whether the courts in this country would believe the testimonies of prostitutes?”

Lorensi: “I cannot be sure about it because it depends on the circumstances. Still, please, consider that in any case, regardless of whether or not evidence against you emerges, your name would be dragged through the courts and given this severe charge, it would be exposed to shame. You still have time to do what you think fit but soon that won't be possible.”

Pedrinelli (after a short deliberation): “I can see that in this matter, I can only lose. Still, before I give you my definitive statement, I'd like to talk about this with the supreme burgrave [i.e., President of the Gubernium, note of the author] and I'll let you know my decision then.”

Lorensi: “No one's stopping you from doing that. Nonetheless, I have good reasons to assure you that His Excellency won't give you any hope and will only agree to your immediate departure abroad.”

Not only the recorded discussion between the two men but the entire report then abruptly ends with an almost triumphant remark: “on the following day, Pedrinelli applied for a passport to Munich, on the sixth he left Prague, and on the eighth he entered the territory of Bavaria!” Amid all this self-satisfaction Lorensi probably made a small mistake in dates, because Pedrinelli in fact applied for a passport to Munich—where “his affairs had been pressing him to go for some time”—on the day of the interview, that is, on February 4.⁷² Thanks to a description recorded for this purpose, we also know what he looked like.⁷³ His passport was then issued on February 5, and with it in hand Pedrinelli left Prague on the following day.

The Austrian government thus managed to get rid of a problematic foreigner. His departure was almost immediately followed by an instruction to border officials not to allow him to return to Bohemia. The Prague police also informed the directorate of the Munich police about him, although without any hint regarding his transgressions against morals.⁷⁴ Lorensi then acquired further information about Pedrinelli's conduct in Munich and his intentions both from the local police and from correspondence addressed to his former housekeeper and Italian friends (i.e., from letters that Lorensi seems to have been opening). Until 1826, Pedrinelli kept trying to return, at least temporarily, to Bohemia in order to settle his affairs, including the equipment of his distillery, and to take care of the housekeeper. At the same time, however, he was putting down roots in the Bavarian metropolis, where—as in Prague—he operated a distillery but was also active in sciences and arts. In 1830, he returned to Naples and eight years later he died in Caivano.⁷⁵

Although in the early nineteenth century the police force was becoming professionalized and its procedures standardized, and although we may acquire the impression that the reports compiled by the ambitious passport official Lorensi faithfully document not only Pedrinelli's deeds but also his thoughts, police sources must be approached with caution. What seems indisputable in this case is that the threat of criminal investigation for moral delicts could be successfully used to put pressure on someone. It is evident that the mere threat of having one's name tainted by such investigation—regardless of which particulars of Pedrinelli's actions would be considered criminal by the court (sexual intercourse with men, or rather young men in a subservient position, or particular sexual practices)—was quite sufficient.

In the Austrian law, the use of prostitutes did not in itself qualify as even a minor “police delict,” but in the context of investigation of other actions it could have a defamatory or blackmailing potential, as Sabine Kienitz's study on Hall has shown.⁷⁶ Sexual relations with persons of the same sex, however, did in Austria after the adoption of the legal code of 1803/04 once again constitute a criminal offense and Lorensi seems to have been well aware of it. It is also possible that Pedrinelli chose as the place of his next residence Munich because this behavior was legal there: the liberal Bavarian legal code of 1813 criminalized homosexual sexual relations only if they involved persons under twelve years of age.⁷⁷ How Pedrinelli's behavior would have been treated by the Austrian, and in particular Prague, courts must remain a matter of speculation.⁷⁸

In any case, it was evidently quite sufficient for the police to threaten Pedrinelli to get what they wanted. In the official correspondence and public reports, no one seemed to entertain the idea of linking Pedrinelli's moral excesses with his revolutionary past, for instance for the purpose of propagandistic denigration of revolution as such. On the other hand, in pamphlets the charge of “immorality” was deployed against the institutions and social groups associated with the “old regime,” as well as against Italy altogether, as we saw in Berghofer's report.

The language used by officials to describe Pedrinelli's alleged immoral behavior can be analyzed and related either to terminology used in similar cases or to normative texts and ideas of the time. Police reports also offer some limited basis for speculation about how the actors themselves spoke about these behaviors. While on the one hand, Pedrinelli avoided any more specific references even after Lorensi specified what he meant by “extravagance” (stravaganza), the female sources in their statements were relatively explicit.⁷⁹ This is quite understandable: testimonies of the prostitutes were supposed to serve as evidence, which is why they had to be quite concrete, while Pedrinelli denied any wrongdoing. When Lisette Wowes spoke about Pedrinelli requesting sexual intercourse (Genuss) “like pederasts do,” she possibly meant anal intercourse. This is even more likely in the light of the fact that in the same context she also spoke about intercourse “in the mouth.” For Pedrinelli's sexual activities in relation to both women and young men, the female witnesses used terms such as “enjoy,” “make use of,” “use,” and “serve oneself” (genießen, gebrauchen, benützen, sich bedienen)—all expressions which seems to indicate the unequal nature of these relationships.⁸⁰

Commissioner Konrad's words about Pedrinelli practicing “pederasty” with women as well, and this possibly having a negative impact on health, also point to a sexual practice. Police director Hoch in his report for the Gubernium added to Konrad's characterization of Pedrinelli's behavior as “misdeeds” (Unthaten) and refers to the victims of his “lust” (Wollust), while also using the term “vice” (Laster) and speaking of the “vice of pederasty.” To denote a practice that was elsewhere called “pederastic relations,” he used the phrase “unnatural manner.” In minister Sedlnitzky's reaction, on the other hand, we find a more general reference to “immoral and illegal behavior” as well as words taken from the legal qualification found in the criminal code, namely “fornication against nature” (Unzucht wider die Natur),⁸¹ which is quite unsurprising given his office's position in the whole affair. It was also to be expected that the agile spy Lorensi would be more loquacious than the matter-of-fact minister: even when the police already had at their disposal testimonies of the prostitutes, he wrote in his report about Pedrinelli's “harmful experiment,” “sodomite sins,” and “dissolute lifestyle.”

The semantics of this kind of immorality are similar to expressions used in the context of comparable cases that took place in other parts of the Austrian Empire. For instance, in Vienna, in the summer of 1820, the police investigated homosexual sexual contacts believed to be occurring, for payment and in public, between soldiers and some civilians on the one hand and male passers-by on the other. A representative of the main police directorate (Polizeioberdirektion), who had already detained some of these men, wrote in his report about “shameful” and “disgusting” mischief, “shameful fornication,” and “the vice of pederasty or masturbation.” In reaction to this, and without differentiating the type of sexual activity concerned, the Police Ministry (Polizeihofstelle) denounced this behavior on a general level as “moral abomination” and called for oversight of public morality and order.⁸² The superior office (Polizeioberdirektion) also criticized the actions of district police directorates, complaining that the latter were only supposed to detain the guilty parties, not to investigate or even punish them, since that was the role of the courts. The main police directorate was also supposed to make the utmost efforts to detect “all the various kinds of fornication that take place among men whose numbers have been increasing in public places for some time, where, usually at dusk or at night, various contacting, tempting, or invitations take place.”⁸³ It was also reported in 1829 that in some public parts of Vienna sexual relations were taking place between younger and older men in the form of prostitution.⁸⁴

*

In Vienna, the police dealt with such cases as part of its public role, while in Prague, the reports on Pedrinelli were the result of the secret surveillance of a politically suspect person. Nevertheless, we can see some parallels in the official discourse regarding this “immoral” behavior. All officials in principle condemned such behavior as not only illegal but also shameful, scandalous, and immoral. The expression “vice” (Laster), which often appears in this context, does not seem to have had a religious connotation, however, since a phrase referring to vice in a possibly religious sense appears only once, namely in Lorensi's report where he uses the emphatic expression “sodomite vices.” While lower police officials tended to describe sexual behaviors in relative detail and with a degree of differentiation (which was naturally important from the perspective of providing evidence for convictions), their superiors, especially the Police Ministry but also the Bohemian Gubernium, tended to use either less concrete terms or categories defined in the criminal code. It is also interesting to note that the criminal code of 1803/04 does not use the term “vice” in either its secular connotation (Laster) or the religious one, in the sense of a “sin” (Sünde). In police texts, such as Eichler's manual, but also in reports by some policemen, we encounter these expressions, but they indicate a traditional condemnation rather than a religious framing of this behavior.

Moreover, to the extent that we can reconstruct them from official and police communication, public attitudes to behaviors that carried sanctions did not generally invoke a religious context. In the newspapers, other printed texts, but also in testimonies, we do nevertheless encounter sharp ethical condemnation of prostitution and its use, as well as of homosexual relations, which were often linked to economic or political dependence or outright abuse of power. While in the case of Prague students in 1793, the students may have expressed moral outrage to deflect the attention of authorities from their own role in the affair (and use of prostitution), Amand Berghofer in his Forbidden Writings rejected prostitution and all sexuality focused solely on physical pleasure as a degradation of the new concept of affection-based relations between a man and a woman. In Berghofer's writing, this went hand in hand with a rejection of the traditional hierarchy of power as well as institutions such as celibacy, which result in abuse by leading to unnatural behaviors and deformations while at the same time masking them.

Based on several examples, we can conclude that the police were criticized for providing protection to the mighty and powerful as well as for using morally suspect persons and behaviors to achieve their goals. In Berghofer's case, this critique of the police was based on rather modernistic foundations. A similar kind of critique nevertheless appears as early as 1773, when the Bohemian–Austrian court chancellery rejected the use of spies and informers by the police as incompatible with the freedom of burghers/civic freedom (bürgerliche Freiheit).⁸⁵ Here, too, the aim may have been not only to protect the private lives of burghers but also to be seen to be taking a condemnatory stance vis-à-vis persons leading dishonest or “immoral” lives on whose services the police were accused of relying.

An example of cases where the police actually used not only a prostitute but also other women from her surroundings, albeit as witnesses rather than informers, is found in the above case of the blackmailing of Gabriele Pedrinelli in 1823/24. Nevertheless, the primary goal of the Prague police in that instance was to get Pedrinelli out of the Austrian Empire, not to protect the morals of the town. One could thus expect that the networks used by Pedrinelli to acquire sexual contacts were not investigated further after his departure.⁸⁶ On the other hand, it is also clear that the police did not completely close their eyes to homosexual relations and prostitution, as attested by the Viennese cases from the 1820s.

The attitude of the Austrian police to prostitution and other moral delicts in the first third of the nineteenth century was characterized by a combination of tolerance and exemplary punishments in cases that caused “public outrage” that were linked to other offenses, or jeopardized the “moral education of the youth.”⁸⁷ In our cases, the youth at risk were mainly men, especially men of higher social standing or ambitions, typically students.

The answer to the question of to what extent the police were the driving force of modernization in relation to public morality at this time is ambiguous. To a large extent, it depends on how one defines modernization. The absence of the religious connotation of terms used by the law and in police work does not, on its own, attest to very much. On a practical level, when it came to protecting persons who were facing immediate threat, the police did not see to make distinction between them (e.g., based on their social class). But that did not amount to an equal civic status of these persons. Although the police explicitly declared equal treatment of all, and even if investigation and punishment of persons from traditional higher social classes (the nobility, higher state administration) did on occasion take place, officials undertook such steps only on rare occasions.⁸⁸ The enlightened criticism of Berghofer, the “Austrian Rousseau,” who indicated that the police cover up the moral shortcomings of members of the upper classes may well have been justified.

If we look aside from the egalitarian attitude of the police in life-threatening situations on the one hand and from cases of clearcut favoritism and corruption on the other hand, we can conclude that Prague police in the first third of the nineteenth century protected and preserved not only the political but also the social status quo. Prostitution, but also homosexuality, which was no longer perceived as a sin, was prosecuted as phenomena that threatened the moral cultivation and self-perfection of (young) men. The men in question did not, however, include members of the lower urban classes, that is, the apprentices, laborers, and the poor. These were viewed by the police as the “mob,” and thus incapable of moral improvement. Pedrinelli's case moreover shows that the political interest in getting rid of a “revolutionary” suspect was considered more pressing than investigation of potentially illegal (homosexual) behavior, much less the protection of victims of unequal power relations.

Public opinion, here represented in a radical form by Berghofer, could criticize the police for laxity in cases endangering social morals. Even so, one can interpret the role of the police at this time as supporting a new, modern moral order which required the ability to resist moral lapses especially from men, regardless of their origin. With its activity, the police at the same time also contributed to the definition of a way of life which represented the reverse of this order, a way of life that was characterized by, among other things, unregulated sexuality or alcohol consumption and associated with particular groups especially in the urban society.⁸⁹ Given that even some nineteenth-century criminologists saw a route toward the autonomy of the bourgeois subject in morality, or rather in the protection of citizens from the negative impacts of their instincts,⁹⁰ it is just one more reason why one should include this perspective in an investigation of police and official practice in the early years of modern civil society.