POLICING LEISURE

John K. Walton

Leisure is a problem for governments and employers because the time and space it occupies and the activities or idleness it entails exist beyond the disciplines imposed by the need to make a living. Leisure activities are capable of invading or otherwise affecting the workplace in ways that disrupt production and threaten output. In addition they can take on guises that threaten basic aspects of state power, breaking or challenging the law by attacking property, attacking a person or the official version of consensual morality, and disturbing the peace or outraging the sensibilities of influential citizens. But leisure is also capable of shoring up the established order, whether by distracting people from grievances that might otherwise politicize them in radical ways or at least give rise to riot and disorder or by promoting thrift, domesticity, the respectable pursuit of approved knowledge (put another way, the acquisition of "cultural capital" of acceptable kinds), attachment to unthreatening religious organizations, or patriotism, discipline, and other acceptable qualities. Leisure can also provide investment outlets and returns on capital for entrepreneurs and investors whose interests are bound up with meeting popular demand in ways acceptable to authority and consensual state-endorsed morality. This last point, in particular, draws attention to important conflicts and paradoxes inherent in the relationship between the modern state and the development of leisure. As leisure provision is drawn into the marketplace, it develops its own propertied interests, who have a stake in what is provided and whose efforts to allure or satisfy customers may lead them into conflict with the state (national or local) as guardian of order, morality, and other kinds of property. Their attempts to meet the state's conditions for continuing operation, for example, by accepting censorship, may affect the nature of their own output. This theme is particularly evident and contentious when sex and intoxicating substances are at issue or when popular commercial entertainment also has radical political content. The theme recurs throughout this article alongside questions relating to class, gender, ethnicity, and the construction of identities.

These themes worked themselves out in contrasting ways in different parts of Europe, with differing patterns of change over time. The pretensions of the state to intervene in the private sphere, the role of religion and its relationship with the state, the extent of governmental tolerance of organized oppositional culture, the level of urbanization and the pace and nature of industrial development and agrarian change, the timing and nature of the emergence of leisure industries, and the extent of governmental willingness to expend resources on the policing of leisure all affected outcomes. Moreover patterns varied in different kinds of places within countries or economic regions. Leisure was policed in different ways according to the degree of threat activities posed to the lifestyles and property of the influential, to the dignity and ceremony of centers of government, and to the productivity of industrial workforces. Some popular or disreputable districts were just too difficult to police from without in direct, formal ways that might seem oppressive and provoke resistance. There surveillance might be confined to policing boundaries and keeping incompatible lifestyles apart. As specialized resort towns emerged, conflicts over appropriate or preferred uses of desirable spaces became particularly pressing. Residential suburbs had to be guarded more straightforwardly against plebeian incursion. Account has to be taken of these differences and developments.

ORGANS OF POLICING LEISURE

Who might be said to have policed leisure, how, on whose behalf, and with what success? Police forces, in the sense of bodies of men and later women charged with the duty of maintaining order in public and some private places and with power to inflict penalties on those who defy or ignore the laws they enforce, are only part of this story. They are far from a simple or straightforward part, even when the extent of their ambitions or those of their paymasters has been so extensive as to attract the label "police state," whether retrospectively or at the time. Consider, for example, the elaborate structures of control that already existed in the eighteenth-century Grand Duchy of Württemberg, now in Germany. Parallel local hierarchies existed, the Lutheran Church and the state, with the pastor, schoolmaster, and church consistory ranged alongside local court, council, bailiff and Bürgermeister (mayor) in each village. The district ducal commissioner or Amtmann held regular courts of heads of households in every settlement. Church pastors were required to appoint "secret censores" to report moral failings, and they offered rewards for prosecuting neighbors for "immorality, laziness, idleness or general disorderliness," under which headings much disreputable leisure activity could be gathered. But despite all efforts to encourage Württemberg villagers in self-control and mutual denunciation and to persuade them to internalize "official" values, a whole range of proscribed leisure activities and illicit beliefs flourished, helped by the tensions between the different arms of the surveillance machinery. For example, pastors and schoolmasters fell out, and mutual denunciations canceled each other out.

Ambitious aspirations to control also flourished in the contrasting setting of eighteenth-century Paris. François Jacques Guillauté remarked in 1750, "The policing of a city . . . is the surveillance of an infinite accumulation of little items." Guillauté's efforts to supervise work, leisure, and supplies led him to a proto-Benthamite or Foucauldian plan to divide the city into "twenty districts, of twenty sections, of twenty houses numbered street by street, each storey designated by a number, each lodging by a letter," an apparatus of commissaires (commissioners), inspecteurs (inspectors), and syndics, and an identification card system with a view to setting up a complete regulatory system to record all comings and goings. Such aspirations generated wonderful archives but understandably fell far short of their goal. One failing was the propensity of the police to be corruptible by gamblers and brothel-keepers. Policing leisure in the eighteenth-century metropolis was even more difficult than in the countryside.

At the other end of this period the better-known totalitarianism of Eastern Europe under Stalinism and its successor regimes similarly had its limitations, despite fearsomely holistic aspirations and an extensive commitment of resources. Even during the 1930s, after the militants of the cultural revolution had "destroyed the mechanisms of commercial culture" (Stites, 1992) and tried to impose a state-sponsored culture of high-minded improvement whose populist rhetoric failed to disguise its prescriptive puritanical aspirations, Soviet citizens still had a measure of agency and choice within a mass culture that found room for "what some people would call simple, common or vulgar entertainments." The state had to adjust its goals to take account of popular tastes and preferences. In the post-Stalin era this became increasingly obvious, as the Houses of Culture, which were supposed to provide culture and entertainment for all and socialize them into an approved socialist frame of mind, were infiltrated by hobbyists, interest groups, and enthusiasts who might pay lip service to orthodoxy but derived their satisfactions elsewhere, regarding their particular pleasures as ends in themselves rather than means toward what the authorities called "cultural enlightenment." After 1953 consumer needs received growing attention, and Western fashions increasingly infiltrated. Leisure reverted overtly to the private sphere, and the state cultural apparatus became depoliticized. State bureaucrats' ambitions to impose a unified set of officially approved leisure and cultural preferences were frustrated, and popular culture never lost its pluralism. This held good in Hungary and Poland as well as the USSR.

This was the case even in states with ambitions to police leisure by suppressing alternatives and winning hearts and minds through active provision of approved facilities and activities while backing their efforts up with coercion and terror and warrening society with informers. Other European settings established much narrower limits to the successful policing of pleasures. Leisure aspirations could be repressed, discouraged, channeled, or controlled in many ways. But as some historians' successful challenges to the simplistic social control literature of the 1970s demonstrated, the play (in both senses) in social systems kept the technologies of control, formal or informal, from making the desired or posited impact. This was especially the case where, as in Britain, the direct role of the state in policing leisure was limited to banning specific activities that shocked influential sensibilities, licensing and surveillance of commercially run gathering places that involved the consumption of intoxicants and perceived threats to order and morality, and preservation of a sense of security in the streets and other public places. Levels of involvement in these spheres changed over time, especially in an interventionist direction in response to novel levels of urbanization and social dislocation, most obviously associated with the industrial revolution and the two world wars.

A strong de facto economic dimension of the most basic kind figured in the policing of leisure. The spread of industrial work discipline from the late eighteenth century accentuated the demarcation between work and leisure time. Working hours expanded and were policed more effectively until the mid- or late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the rise of Fordism and Taylorism tightened the screws on industrial workforces again. The increasing importance of precise clock time as opposed to more traditional, less precise measurements contributed to these changes. However, in rural France and some other rural areas the working day had long been punctuated by the bells of the parish church announcing meal breaks and the conventional times for starting and ending work. In many industrial settings, too, leisure was smuggled into the workplace, often lubricated by drink. The successful importing of drink was an important part of an apprentice's skills in engineering as late as the 1870s. When workers took pride in craft and workforces lived in close proximity, the skills and techniques of work might be discussed sociably afterward over a few drinks. This pattern apparently declined in late-nineteenth-century London but persisted long afterward in other settings, especially those associated with coal mining. The pressures and de-skilling of "machinofacture," assembly lines, and other routinized workplaces brought about the separation of work and leisure, which entailed the effective policing of leisure at the workplace.

Real wage levels exerted their own policing function regarding what kind of leisure and how much could be afforded, especially if defiance of labor discipline might prejudice future employment. Under-employment and unemployment generated unwanted leisure for those who lacked the resources to enjoy it. At higher social levels middle-class orthodoxy believed that the work-leisure boundary was patrolled by a work ethic that required long, committed hours of managing resources and markets. But the extensive evidence of high spending and pleasure preferences among the industrial and commercial middle classes, even in the mid-nineteenth century, undermines the moral force of such pretensions outside the ranks of a few well-documented eccentrics. The aristocracy and its associates in the so-called "leisure class" had to work at their leisure because they were required to follow a strict timetable of formal events, where they displayed themselves with all the formality of a rigid system of etiquette. These issues defy easy categorization.

INDIRECT REGULATION

Much of the regulation of popular leisure arose indirectly, through school and religious influences, through voluntary organizations acting as pressure groups, and elusively but importantly through the restraining influence of widely shared values that were not necessarily those fostered by the government or churches, though they might look like them from a distance. Formal schooling, whatever the relationship between voluntary bodies (usually religious) and the state in its provision, entailed the imposition of discipline in punctuality, cleanliness, and classroom behavior. These values were expected to have an impact on both work and leisure. Bodies like the English Sunday Schools were among the organizers of counter attractions to lure children and adults away from the temptations of fairs, festivals, and drinking places. Churches, temperance organizations, mutual insurance societies, and other voluntary bodies also offered alternatives, which might involve tea parties, picnics, or excursions to the countryside or the coast. These options, particularly evident from the 1830s onward, survived strongly through the nineteenth century before beginning to decay in the twentieth century. Such provisions often failed to meet the expectations of promoters, as the recipients took the opportunities and rejected aspects of the message, going to the picnic in the afternoon, to the fairground in the evening, or on railway excursions organized by the temperance movement and getting drunk at the seaside.

Churches and moral reform organizations also formed pressure groups to change the laws regarding leisure activities in more restrictive directions. In the nineteenth century and early twentieth century they worked toward tighter regulation of, for example, Sunday observance, permitted drinking hours, gambling in public places, and sexual immorality in various guises. In the twentieth century, especially after World War I, the external influences on government worked in the opposite direction. Pressure groups fought rearguard actions against liberated social practices. Sunday observance became less widely enforced, even in Protestant northern Europe. The Catholic "continental Sunday" had long been a source of complaint among English advocates of restriction. Constraints on the open hours of drinking and dancing establishments fell away sharply across Western Europe in the last quarter of the twentieth century. In the industrial Ruhr district of Germany, for example, where Catholics and Protestants lived side by side, the spread of commercially run Sunday dancing was such a strong trend in the late nineteenth century that the police, despite ineffectual aspirations, were quite unable to control it.

Everywhere most of the intervention was directed at the working class, as in the ineffectual prohibition of street betting on horse races in England between 1853 and the legalization of betting shops in 1961. Yet the leisure practices of the comfortable were not immune from censure and legislative interference. Casino gambling, especially roulette and baccarat, was the object of periodic moral panics and campaigns for intervention across most of Europe. In Britain, significantly, its legal existence was unthinkable between the mid-eighteenth century and the late twentieth century. Gambling was banned successively but temporarily in France, the German states, and Belgium at various points in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and in Spain definitively in 1924 after many years of de facto toleration while the law was ignored. The fashion for tanning, which spread across the European beach haunts of the wealthy after World War I, called forth outraged campaigns about the immorality of bodily exposure in several Catholic countries. It reached a climax of outrage with efforts at legislative intervention in Belgium and Spain in the mid-1930s, and the Spanish Civil War settled the outcome in that country in favor of extreme restrictions for more than a generation.

These interventions were only part of the story and rarely the most important or effective part. More important was the policing that operated hegemonically, as people restricted their own leisure choices according to versions of propriety and suitability that became enshrined as common sense. Submission to prescribed regimes of exercise or self-presentation might fall into this broad category, as leisure was adjusted to meet the dictates of fashion or the medical prescriptions that governed when and how to bathe at a spa or the seaside.

Generally more significant was the tyranny of respectability in its various guises, restraining leisure behavior on the basis of concern for what peers, workmates, neighbors, and employers might think. This was the most pervasive and diffuse vector for policing leisure, all the more effective when it was genuinely self-policing. But these constraints had to come from within, and Peter Bailey rightly emphasized that for many people respectable behavior was contingent on external circumstances. Not only might the boundaries of acceptability vary for individuals according to context and company, but claims to respectability might be proffered or abandoned at will. Consequently for most people it was more like a garment that was donned or discarded according to circumstances than like a consistent, articulated, internalized identity. Shani D'Cruze's work on women, leisure, and the circumstances of sexual assault in the Lancashire cotton manufacturing district in the late nineteenth century shows that working-class communities and different groups within them had their own ideas about what constituted acceptable or reprehensible behavior, and the lines between them shaded according to circumstances. The ideas were no less real to the actors involved than the stricter definitions that prevailed among those who made or enforced the law. The "rough" working class, so labeled by outsiders, had its own internalized respectabilities that amounted to a significant degree of self-policing.

The external policing of leisure by the national or local state, featuring laws to legitimize the coercive restraint of controversial activities, was nevertheless important. However, its impact never matched its aspirations or those of the moral reform pressure groups who tried to extend and tighten its grasp. Over much of Europe the changes associated with industrialization, urbanization, and swelling migration flows coincided with an evangelical religious revival in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The fears of authority facing novel agglomerations of people with an obvious potential for subversion of all kinds were augmented by influential pressures for control from well-connected religious groups. This applied in Catholic as well as Protestant Europe. In the late nineteenth century, as these voices became somewhat less clamorous and carried less conviction, their place was taken by a social Darwinist and eugenicist agenda concerned that overindulgence in popular pleasures would not only plunge families into the secondary poverty that arose from the misuse of otherwise adequate resources but would also further the degeneration of the race. Both the religious and the eugenicist concerns still made impacts in the 1920s and 1930s, and their voices were far from stilled in the late twentieth century.

In the interwar years, however, it was increasingly acceptable for even the working classes to enjoy pleasure for its own sake, without the overt addition of a legitimizing agenda of moral or physical recreation. The leisure revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of hedonistic working- and middle-class consumers began to break the bounds that had constrained their forebears, definitively changed these expectations, as, for example, restrictions on open hours began to crumble and licensing hours were relaxed. Even then, however, policing leisure remained important or even more so, as problems associated with newly popular drugs, with hooliganism at spectator sporting events, and with urban violence attained a higher profile in the eyes of the media and the government.

POLICING FESTIVALS

What kinds of leisure were perceived to need policing, and how did this perception change over time? Above all, large-scale popular festive gatherings of any kind attracted the paternal and disciplinary attention of authority, whether their ostensible bases were religious or secular. So did all activities involving the consumption of alcohol, gambling, violence, close contact between the sexes, or any rowdy liveliness that encroached on the public street, disrupted traffic and trade, or appeared to threaten the property, security, and dignity of the comfortable. Under the first heading came, most obviously, fairs, carnival, wakes, or other local feast days. Fairs, as trading events with entertainments grafted on to reap the opportunities offered by large crowds with money in their pockets, were already boisterous and potentially dangerous events in the London of Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair (1614). Over time the balance between commerce and amusement steadily tilted to the latter, even in the provinces. These were calendar customs, marking out the passage of the year and underpinned by custom. When the calendar changed in 1752, the English had to make decisions about whether to observe the new date or the old.

Over much of Catholic Europe religious observances gathered crowds for traditional, evolving ceremonies. Carnival, a feast of excess and misrule at the approach to the lean times prescribed by Lent, was overtly an occasion for the subversion of authority, disguises involving challenges to status and gender boundaries, excess, and the upending, temporarily and symbolically, of the usual social and moral order. Even England had its petty carnivals. On 5 November the saving of a Protestant Parliament through the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was commemorated with bonfires, blazing tar barrels, and sometimes the burning in effigy of unpopular contemporary figures. In a minor echo of carnival, too, Shrove Tuesday celebrations often included mass football games involving most of the male inhabitants of a parish, following conventions rather than rules and entailing systematic horseplay and conventionalized violence. Right across Europe, too, local festivals commemorating the patron saint of the parish were celebrated with drinking and dancing as well as formal religious services, drawing in people from surrounding settlements along with the locals.

These big traditional gatherings were policed mainly by convention and consent during the eighteenth century. The local festivals suffered increasingly from the withdrawal of elite patronage, as landed society withdrew into its own select institutions, disappeared for long periods to the new leisure towns or to the metropolis, and lost touch with local popular culture. Festivals did not come under direct attack until the beginning of the nineteenth century, and then the criticisms were usually the economic disruptions of industrialization and a widespread decline of rural laborers' incomes rather than directly coercive. Much the same applied to the fairs, which gradually came under pressure from the rise of new patterns of trade, especially through the growth of fixed-site retailing alongside the regular weekly markets. As fairs lost the commercial functions that gave them legitimacy, they were more vulnerable to suppression at the behest of the upholders of order and morality. Hiring fairs for farm servants, where young people who had been confined in service for several months might enjoy a few liberated days of drinking and dancing while they looked for a new employer, were particularly worrying in the eyes of reformers. But in the parts of England where this mode of employment remained strong the fairs survived well beyond World War I.

Carnival, with a much stronger purchase among the urban elites of Catholic Europe, was more resilient. These large-scale annual events were difficult to police in the formal, bureaucratic manner that emerged, at least on paper, in much of Europe by the early nineteenth century. The scale of carnival's turbulence was beyond the intervention of small numbers of ill-paid police forces, whose members were part of the culture they were policing. The only way to control carnival in the short run was to suppress it. This became an option, as the fairs and parish feasts came under economic pressure anyway. Attempts at closure were invariably resisted in urban settings, and the pattern of suppression in England before 1870 was overwhelmingly weighted toward small agricultural villages in the south and east. In many urban settings and settings that were becoming urban, local festivals adapted to new economic circumstances and sometimes gained a new vitality by attracting commercial patronage from publicans and other entertainment entrepreneurs. Pleasure fairs circulated with increasingly sophisticated amusement technology. This in turn brought renewed pressure for suppression from religious interests with allies among local residents and property owners whose lives were disrupted, whose sensibilities were affronted, and who did not benefit from the extra trade generated. When attempts were made to ban urban fairgrounds from municipal property, fairs merely migrated to new sites on private land and continued to flourish. The urban pleasure fair was tamed in the late nineteenth century more by regulating the propertied interests associated with it through licensing and associated surveillance than from coercive suppression, which was rarely practical politics. Especially in parts of northern England, local popular holidays were increasingly associated with excursions to the seaside and the countryside, leaving the local festivities increasingly etiolated.

POLICING SPECIFIC PRACTICES

Those who sought to police popular morality along the lines of the evangelical revival of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, echoing the moral panic evoked by the rise of the urban working class, were more successful in intervening against specific practices than in suppressing whole festivals. In this role formal, disciplined police forces eventually came into their own. Some specific intervention came earlier with attempts to police prostitution in eighteenth-century London and Paris. Aspirations to suppress foundered on the ubiquity of the services and the market for them and the impossibility of preventing the police from being seduced into protecting many they were supposed to be arresting. In England it was easier to target popular blood sports, which were more disruptive, less consensual, and more appealing to a masculine cult of violence and cruelty that attracted censure both from evangelicals and from secular advocates of gentlemanly civility and moderation. In the early nineteenth century cockfighting, bullbaiting, and the Stamford custom of bull running were abolished officially. The last Stamford bull-running ended in a celebrated standoff between troops, police, and traditionalist locals during the late 1820s. Cockfighting survived as a disreputable clandestine activity, along with dogfighting and human pugilism. These pursuits were targets for the new police forces. Peel's Metropolitan Police of 1829 provided a model that rapidly disseminated through the counties and boroughs in the 1830s. Success in dealing with pugilism was limited by promoters, who chose sites on county boundaries, where fights could easily be relocated out of reach of interfering local policemen. Significantly foxhunting and hare coursing, which retained not only aristocratic and genteel patronage but were also rural activities with a strong following among farmers, remained unscathed. The rural police did become active in conjunction with the gamekeepers who acted as the landowners' private estate police forces in pursuing poachers. The status of pheasants and similar creatures as property was disputable because they were reared by estate owners but were wild in their freedom to roam. Efforts to catch pheasants clearly combined pleasure with profit and an element of challenge to the rural social order. This theme runs right through the period. Even among blood sports in England, what was policed and how it was policed depended on whose leisure was at issue in explicitly class terms.

Something similar applied to the popular village and small town football games, many of which survived into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England. Survivals were confined to small, stagnating towns and villages that were slow to develop formal local government institutions and the corresponding local police presence and whose commercial interests were neither assertive nor influential enough to require intervention to protect their property and trade. Workington, the largest town to keep a mass football game, an Easter calendar custom in this case, did so after losing it for several years. In Workington survival was assisted when the game became a curiosity that attracted trainloads of lucrative spectators from the surrounding area. The outcome may also have been affected by the town's distance from higher-order centers of government. Usually this kind of activity was a prime candidate for police intervention and suppression, as were other popular sports that used public spaces, such as roadracing, proscribed because of the competitors' preferred state of undress and because the crowds blocked the streets, and stone bowling, a Lancashire pastime suppressed in the 1860s as a hazard to other road users.

Football in England was policed by another route. The public schools and their associated cult of "muscular Christianity" imposed rules limiting time, space, numbers, and acceptable behavior, which were available nationally from 1863. Rules formed part of a wider pattern of taming popular sports through the formal codification of regulations imposed on the competitors, thereby making games more acceptable in the new, more disciplined urban societies. Football's expansion on this new basis as soccer and rugby meant that aspects of it were self-policing through the voluntary organizations that oversaw its development and disciplined offenders and recalcitrants. This became the norm elsewhere in Europe. Where clubs remained amateur, their finances were policed, often ineffectively, by the ruling bodies. Even where the professional game came in, travel expenses and wage payments were limited and regulated. In Britain professional soccer players were subjected to a maximum wage until the early 1960s, and illegal payments to players were severely punished. As the varieties of football developed into spectator sports across Europe, the formal police forces of town, county, and province also needed to keep order among the watching throng. Debates continue about the origins of football hooliganism and when crowd misbehavior reached a level to deserve that label. While disorder was not absent in the early days of large-scale spectatorship in the late nineteenth century, the sheer scale and violence of the last quarter of the twentieth century was completely unprecedented and all the more alarming for that.

Policing by regimes of rule and administration imposed and enforced by the voluntary bodies, which ran the sports and could cast dissenters into a sporting wilderness, was echoed in other sports that emerged or were remodeled in the late nineteenth century. Many ruling bodies, as in athletics and rowing, cleaved to an amateur ideal that excluded, marginalized, or disadvantaged the working class, which was developing its own separate sports federations by the interwar years. Other sports also followed football in excluding women. Women's bodies at leisure were policed by rule and convention in the sporting sphere as in others, as expectations about passivity and the dangers of vigorous exercise continued to dominate medical orthodoxies until well after World War II.

POLICING PRIVATE BEHAVIOR

Formal intervention by the policing regimes of national and local government was particularly associated with the regulation of relations between the sexes, especially where alcohol was also involved. This was central to the concerns over fairs and other calendar customs, but it was increasingly sustained regarding the daily and weekly routines of popular pleasure, where along with the regulation of gambling pastimes, the intervention of police forces in everyday life was perhaps most resented and controversial. Attempts to corral commercial sex into licensed brothels were unthinkable in Britain but were common over long periods in southern Europe. In Spain at the beginning of the twentieth century it was an acknowledged but seldom discussed reality. Prostitutes walking the streets, where their importunities annoyed passersby and their presence might create embarrassing situations for "respectable" women, posed problems of police regulation everywhere, especially in resorts and the developing shopping and theater districts of larger towns.

Working-class courting customs in the public street also aroused complaint in England, although it proved impossible to suppress the so-called "monkey parades" on Sunday evenings, in which young women and young men made contact and arranged assignations. Elsewhere in Europe, for example, in the Spanish institution of the paseo (walk), this seems to have been less worrisome. Outdoor courting customs in urban back alleys and entries, well documented in autobiographies and by the Mass-Observation team who investigated working-class life in Bolton, England, in the late 1930s, apparently were passively tolerated by authorities. What mattered was to keep the main public thoroughfares clear and comfortable for "respectable" passersby. Obvious prostitutes apart, this was more a matter of the police breaking up groups of men who gathered to gossip on street corners, especially when they abused or even committed minor assaults on their "betters." This was a major function of the British police from their introduction, especially in London and in the manufacturing towns of the 1840s.

Private leisure premises were even more difficult to regulate through formal policing. Licensing proved an effective tool up to a point, as establishments became more elaborate and entrepreneurs had more to lose if their activities were legally suppressed. Commercialization of leisure outlets carried its own commitment to self-policing in pursuing an extensive consumer market. Providers could not afford to alienate potential customers by shocking their sensibilities. Eighteenth-century spa resorts employed masters of ceremonies to police "the company," imposing dress codes and shared expectations of politeness and etiquette on potentially overbearing aristocrats as well as on their socially insecure inferiors from the new middle ranks. When an external regulatory regime also had to be satisfied, a certain amount of self-censorship crept in to anticipate and evade problems. Thus by licensing public houses, where beer and spirits were retailed in a sociable atmosphere, English justices of the peace discouraged working-class radical political organizations and trade unions from using them as meeting places because it threatened the livelihoods of the licensees. The Beer Act of 1830 put free trade principles before regulation and allowed beer houses to proliferate outside the magistrates' control, generating moral fears of prostitution, gambling, uncontrolled drunkenness, and political subversion.

Small establishments served well-defined local clienteles, however, and the bigger pleasure palaces that developed in the second half of the nineteenth century were more vulnerable to external pressures. Thus the London music halls of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were inspected for audience composition, with special attention to evidence of prostitution, and program content, with a view to excising sexual innuendos, the undermining of constituted authority, or the ridiculing of clergymen. If they transgressed, the proprietors might suffer indirectly through particularly expensive and demanding interpretations of the fire regulations, for example.

CENSORSHIP OF MEDIA

Performers were difficult to police, especially when they departed from their submitted scripts or when they used idioms impenetrable to would-be censors. The contents of cinema, radio, and eventually television programs were also subjected to censorship. The British cinema in particular faced absurdly specific and restrictive codes that reflected the anxieties of authorities in the interwar years. While the British Broadcasting Corporation exercised monopoly powers over broadcasts, seeking to reconstruct a common culture according to what later became known as "establishment" values, censorship occurred effectively within the organization. World War II precipitated a more populist and inclusive broadcasting culture, and the popularity of rival stations like Radio Luxembourg grew. Breaking out, the radio series Round the Horne, broadcast during the 1960s on the Light Programme to families enjoying Sunday lunch, might include a range of camp homosexual references that the management either failed to understand or gleefully allowed to go through.

Rarely did censorship block up all potential loopholes, and in practice it included negotiations. In Munich, for example, the folk singers who performed on a host of little stages, often in Bavarian dialect and with a strong propensity toward caustic political comment, had long been subjected to censorship of both the political and moral content of their work. In response to protests against censorship in the early twentieth century, the Munich police in 1908 formed an advisory committee of established writers, at one time including Thomas Mann, to pronounce on the artistic merit of controversial items. Nevertheless, comments critical of the regime still had to be couched in coded language. In Belgium and Spain public decency leagues restrained what could be said explicitly, but as elsewhere unscripted innuendos conveyed much. Even after the Weimar Republic abolished censorship, performers still had to carefully consider their output. At this time the effective censors were the ascendant National Socialists, whose reputation for power through direct action was more threatening than were the previous official governments.

DIFFICULTIES IN POLICING LEISURE

Official censorship was equally difficult to enforce in eighteenth-century Paris. Censorship before the French Revolution was erratic, and a great deal of scurrilous and "indecent" material was disseminated through vaudevilles or the extensive market in cheap street literature. Robert Isherwood pointed out, "No doubt, censorship was lax because the police had no desire to stifle a form of entertainment that kept the public diverted" (Isherwood, 1986, pp. 254–255). He cited Alexandre-Jacques Du Coudray's writing in 1775 as an explicit justification for loosely policing popular entertainments, which distract the populace from factionalism and revolt. The relationship between the need to restrain and control and the need to allow a measure of self-expression on the safety valve principle, was always difficult to negotiate.

The perception was, however, that the leisure of the populace above all needed policing. Within that broad category, specific groups or locations aroused disproportionate attention, among them the young of both sexes; sexual nonconformists, including homosexuals as well as prostitutes; concentrated areas identified with poverty and crime, like slums and rookeries; and stigmatized ethnic and religious minorities, for example, the Irish, Jews, or gypsies. The organized public order and defense forces of the state sometimes provided cause for alarm, as when soldiers' training camps or sailors on leave detached from the forces of order. In England during the 1860s, panic about the spread of venereal disease among the armed forces led to passage of the controversial Contagious Diseases Acts, which identified the prostitutes rather than their customers as the source of the problem but still put garrison districts under a distinctive form of martial law for several years.

Above all the leisure subjected to the most sustained policing was that of the lower orders and later the working class, especially when they concentrated in public spaces in large cities. This was particularly true of the centers of government, where disorder of any kind might and sometimes did take on political and revolutionary overtones. The pleasures of the poor constituted one of the most significant specters that haunted the national and the local authorities throughout the period under review, and the official technologies of surveillance were never sufficient. Police methods had to interact with economic, cultural, and psychological systems of control. From the eighteenth century to the twentieth self-policing was at least as important as external restraints in controlling popular leisure in modern Europe.

See also other articles in this section.

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