Weapons and Legitimate Violence: Belgian Gendarmes’ Practices and Debates from 1918 to 1957

This paper aims to bring some new reflexions about the logics of policing in XXth century Belgium. From the end of WWI, the gendarmerie – ‘a ‘full’, national and military police force – became the heart of police apparatus in Belgian Democracy. The gendarmerie grows in terms of means and tasks. Consequently, gendarmes are involved in all administrative police missions, dealing with ‘risks’ to maintain and restore the law and the public order in a changing Democracy. The gendarmes’ policing must deal with this new situation. The use and the limits of violence is one difficult question of this dynamic. In the first half of the XXth century, criticism’s against gendarmes’ intervention, methods, weapons and material means are numerous. Gendarmerie is seen as too violent, as a ‘too powerful’. In the same time, we can observe professional debates and instructions about the scale of public legitimate violence. In this paper, within the violence focus, I want to highlight both the transformation of Belgian Society and policing from the end of World War One to 1957 (marked by the vote of the “gendarmerie organic law”). I’ll more precisely investigate the question of weapons and equipment’s of the Belgian Gendarmerie (use, formation, tactics, but also debates or budgets), to discuss the change of legitimate violence use by this specific military police institution into a society in democratic transition.