The Railway Law Enforcement Activities of the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie before 1940

Abstract

In the second half of the 19^th century and the first decades of the 20^th century, the railway was clearly as much a part of the landscape of rural Hungary as the gendarme on foot or on horseback. The emergence and spread of rail transport was accompanied almost simultaneously by the emergence of public security threats to the infrastructure, passengers or goods transported, but the Hungarian Royal Gendarmerie, which was generally responsible for public security in the countryside, did not have a specialised service branch until 1940. The literature on the history of the corps also traces the tasks of the railway gendarmerie back to the above date of its establishment, while similar activities in the earlier period have not yet been the subject of any scientific research. My study examines the relationship between the railways and the gendarmerie, two prominent elements in the rural landscape of the turn of-the-century decades, from a regulatory and organisational perspective.