Arms and the Victorian Policeman

One evening in the Autumn of 1836 two gendarmes were called to a cabaret in the French Pyrenean village of Hasparren where men were drinking after hours. During the ensuing altercation a man called Castagnes was sabred and killed by gendarme Vissens. The subsequent report to the Minister of the Interior suggested that, perhaps Castagnes’s death did not matter too much since he was ‘a detestable subject, feared for his brutality’. Twenty-one years later ‘quiet, inoffensive’ patrolman Cairns of the city of New York shot dead ‘Sailor Jack’, an Irish longshoreman with a reputation for violence.