The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  His criminal career began with stealing money from the till of his family’s bakery. Later, after he pawned the family silver, his father insisted that the local authorities jail him — Vidocq’s first experience behind bars. Released after two weeks, he stole his mother’s savings and ran away from home. He had wanted to go to America and start a new life but lost his money to a con man along the way. Undaunted but wiser, he joined a traveling theater troupe and circus. He later recalled, “I went about the job, but I didn’t like it. The grease disgusted me and I wasn’t comfortable with the monkeys, which frightened by an unknown face, made unbelievable efforts to tear out my eyes.” 5 Tiring of this adventure, he returned to Arras and begged his mother’s forgiveness, something she could never resist giving him. He and his father were reconciled as well.

  The uneventful life of a village soon bored him, and Vidocq joined the army. Here he fought fifteen duels in six months, according to his Memoirs. Vidocq saw much of Europe with the French army as it carried the Revolution into neighboring countries, but he learned that his chief loyalty must always be to himself. Frequently he was accused of crimes, ranging from assaulting an officer to forgery. Convicted, he usually managed to escape, mastering an ability to disguise himself — at least once in a nun’s habit. Recapture brought him harsher sentences to the “galleys,” which were prisons for hardened criminals, usually those convicted of capital crimes. But the galleys could not hold him either, and in the confusion of the times, Vidocq usually managed to enlist in another regiment — even serving with privateers and naval forces. It was simple enough to assume another name and hence another identity, for there were no records that could provide definite identification of criminals.

  In addition to discarding identities, Vidocq left behind a trail of admiring women wherever he went. One of the conquests he describes in his Memoirs:

  At dark the evening of our departure, I met a woman from Brussels, named Elisa, with whom I had been intimate. She fell on my neck, took me to supper, and, overcoming weak resistance, kept me with her till the next morning. I pretended to Francine [another lover], who had sought me everywhere, that to throw the police off my tracks I had been forced to dash into a house, and I could not get out until daylight. At first she believed me; but chance led her to discover that I had passed the night with a woman.… In her excess of rage she swore that she would have me arrested. Having me put in prison was certainly the safest way to assure herself against my infidelities. As Francine was a woman to do what she said she would, I deemed it prudent to leave her until her anger had cooled. 6

  Vidocq’s many stints in prison, as well as his frequent escapes, had earned him a reputation among criminals. This helped him to find refuge with lawless elements whenever he was out of prison, but it also meant that his only means of earning a living was through crime. Wishing to turn his life around, he managed to arrange a meeting with a man named Dubois, the commissaire of police in Lyons. Vidocq proposed to give him a list of criminals working in the area in return for his freedom. Dubois, who knew of Vidocq’s reputation, was hesitant, fearing a trick. To prove his good faith, Vidocq said he would give the slip to the two gendarmes who were waiting to take him to prison, and voluntarily return to Dubois’s office. Dubois agreed. Not long after Vidocq left, the door opened and he stood there again — without the guards.

  Thus began Vidocq’s double career: as criminal and police informer. He was forced to leave Lyons to save his skin when the criminals who were being rounded up suspected he had betrayed them. He returned to Arras, where his mother still lived, but was unable to convince the police there that he had gone straight. His good intentions rebuffed, he returned to crime again and wound up in Paris, where he developed a relationship with a woman named Annette, whom he later married.

  Paris in the early nineteenth century was not the City of Light it would later become. It was a city of narrow, maze-like streets that were dark and dangerous, twisted alleys and dead ends where bodies were dumped. There were no spacious boulevards or parks with gas lighting. The metropolis was a hotbed of vice and disease. Hordes of people lived in ramshackle ancient buildings; epidemics of cholera periodically swept the city. In this world, the poor were forced to steal for their bread, and street urchins needed sharp wits to survive.

  In 1809, during Napoleon’s rule, Vidocq decided once again to make a break with his criminal past. He sent a letter to “Papa” Henry, divisional chief of the Police Prefecture of Paris, offering his services as a spy in the underworld. Henry could see the value such a man would have, and referred the letter to Baron de Pasquier, the prefect of police, who agreed to give him a chance. In his Memoirs, Vidocq referred to the two men as “my liberators.” 7 For the next two decades, he would employ his talents on the right side of the law.

  At first he served as an informant in La Force Prison in Paris. The authorities had spread rumors that Vidocq had committed a particularly heinous crime. This earned him the respect of the other inmates, who “whispered and even said aloud in talking about me, ‘He’s a murderer,’ and as in that place a murderer ordinarily inspires great confidence, I was careful not to refute an error so useful to my projects.” 8 Some inmates also recognized Vidocq from having served with him in other prisons and knew that he had escaped, adding to his criminal reputation. Finally, after twenty months, he feared that his cover was blown and he “escaped” once again, this time with the connivance of his jailers.

  He returned to Paris, where he lived with his wife in the Marais section. At night he frequented the gaming dens, saloons, and brothels in the most dangerous sections of the city. He listened to the schemes and plots being hatched — sometimes being invited to take part in them — and then reported them to his superiors at the prefecture. “The rogues and thieves whom I daily met there firmly believed me to be one of themselves,” he wrote. 9 He did not see himself as a traitor, because he did not believe that he was a criminal — only a person who had taken up crime out of necessity. He further claimed that he never turned in anyone for stealing bread to feed himself or his family.

  All the while, Vidocq’s ability to disguise himself continued to improve. His biographer Joseph Geringer wrote, “He played pirates with black-patched eyes, runaway convicts under a month’s chin growth, aged thieves behind gray side whiskers, pickpockets with a limp and a cane and a ragged frock, even persons displaced from their homeland — a scar-faced German swordsman wanted by the Berlin police for killing two men in a duel, the dark Sicilian Gypsy who had killed a wife in Castelvetrano, the British barrister, complete with spectacles, wanted for cutting the throat of a rival attorney in London. With dialect and colloquialism to accompany each caricature, Vidocq carried every animation with aplomb.” 10 He was so adept at disguise that he was once approached to make a hit on himself.

  In real life, changing one’s looks and name to alter one’s history, even when practiced by lesser men than Vidocq, was a perennial problem for police forces. In France, galley “slaves” — those who had been sentenced to forced labor — were branded to prevent them from escaping, 11 a practice that was banned in 1832. Afterward, the police had no real way of knowing whether a suspect was a recidivist, or career criminal, because it was nearly impossible to determine if he had ever been arrested before. Vidocq himself, adept at shifting personae, began to tackle that problem.

  ii

  The population of Paris grew to more than one million people between 1800 and 1850, making it the largest city on the mainland of Europe. Vidocq recognized that the sheer size of the metropolis caused difficulty for the police, who were poorly organized. At the time, the Prefecture of Paris, still led by the Baron de Pasquier, was composed of the First Division, or Administrative Branch, and the Second Division, or Special Investigative Branch, under “Papa” Henry. The city was divided into several geographic sectors, each under the jurisdiction of a commissaire with a small staff. The commissaires worked only within their own domains, so criminals who ranged free
ly over the whole city were hard to track down. Vidocq recognized in this confusion a possible job for himself. He suggested that a small group of crime fighters be formed to operate throughout Paris, to keep the criminal and ex-convict population under surveillance. His group could stop crimes before they occurred, a novel idea for the time.

  Henry and de Pasquier had been impressed by Vidocq’s earlier services and agreed to give him four assistants; his staff would grow over time to twenty-eight. They were paid from secret funds and not publicly acknowledged. In the autumn of 1812, Vidocq and his men were formalized as the plainclothes bureau. Thus began the Sûreté, or security police, which was eventually to become the official investigative branch of the French judiciary.

  Vidocq chose ex-criminals and ex-cons for his agents, believing they were the only ones with the street smarts and toughness to do the job he had in mind. Even at this time, Vidocq had it in his mind that, like him, these ex-offenders could become useful members of society. He proudly recalled: “I preferred men whose record had given them a little celebrity. Well! I often gave these men the most delicate missions. They had considerable sums to deliver to the police or the prison offices; they took part in operations in which they could have easily laid hands on large amounts [of money], and not one of them, not a single one, betrayed my trust.” 12

  The men of Vidocq’s force received no salary; instead they were paid a fee and expenses for each arrest. As a result, regular police officers, who disliked the idea of these irregular forces, spread rumors that his men were solving crimes that they themselves had organized. Vidocq denied this, though he readily acknowledged that he and his men mingled with the criminals of Paris: “I did not hesitate to risk myself in this herd of wretches. I associated with them; I fraternized with them; and I soon had the advantage of being considered one of them. It was while I was drinking with these gentlemen that I learned about the crimes they had committed or premeditated.… So I obtained from them all the information I needed. When I gave the signal for an arrest, it was almost certain that the individuals would be taken in the very act, or with the stolen goods, which would justify their sentence.” 13 In case of a shootout, Vidocq would often pretend to be hit and have himself carried away as dead under a quilt.

  Having served in prisons himself, Vidocq knew that they were training grounds for criminals; upon their release, many prisoners promptly returned to a life of crime. So he often visited Bicêtre Prison on the outskirts of Paris and had the warden line up the worst prisoners in the exercise yard. He would walk up and down the line, studying their faces and looking for distinguishing characteristics such as moles, tattoos, and scars, so that he would recognize them when they returned to Paris. Vidocq proved to have a keen memory for faces, perhaps because he himself was so adept at disguise. Among those he arrested was a man who was passing himself off as nobility; Vidocq recognized him as having been in prison for stealing bank notes.

  Vidocq’s superiors approved of his work, and the number of his assistants grew. In 1817, his organization was credited with more than eight hundred arrests. Over time, Vidocq professionalized his department, becoming the first to formalize the process of criminal investigation. He compiled a card-indexing system identifying every criminal he knew of in Paris. He created plaster of paris casts to make molds of footprints. He held patents on indelible ink and unalterable bond paper. (Some of his judgments were less professional. He believed, for instance, that being bowlegged was a symptom of criminality.)

  In 1827, the Police Prefecture’s new head, the Chevalier Duplessis, forced Vidocq to resign for political reasons, although the plainclothes department continued to operate under one of Vidocq’s own ex-criminal agents, Coco Lacour. After the July Revolution of 1830 brought Louis-Philippe, the Citizen King, to power, another prefect of police rehired Vidocq, giving him for the first time the title Chef de la Brigade de Sûreté (Head of the Security Brigade).

  During his brief retirement, Vidocq had written his Memoirs, which became a best seller on both sides of the English Channel. He had completed it with the aid of professional writers and admitted that parts might not be completely true; still, he claimed, “the facts are there.” 14

  Vidocq lost his job for good, however, in 1832. Gisquet, the prefect of police responsible for rehiring and then firing him, wrote in his memoirs: “Vidocq’s methods were so definitely provocative that I decided to dismiss him as well as all the suspect characters of whom he made use. Up to that time it had been very generally thought that a thief must be set to catch a thief. I proposed to use honest men as detectives, and the results proved that I was right.… I ordered the immediate dismissal of all ex-convict employés and decided that in future all members of the regular police should be men with a clean record.” 15 But Vidocq was not finished.

  iii

  On January 3, 1834, Vidocq opened the world’s first private detective agency, which he called his own “private police” business. 16 He offered clients a way of dealing with crime without encountering the bureaucracy of the regular police. His shingle read “Le Bureau de Renseignements,” or Office of Intelligence. He advertised in the newspapers and flooded the streets with flyers passed out by well-dressed young men at the entrances to banks and brokerages.

  The most influential politician of the reign of Louis-Philippe was François Guizot, who expressed the spirit of the times when he famously proclaimed, “Enrich yourself.” Parisians responded enthusiastically. Bankers, merchants, and manufacturers were making fortunes, and in turn confidence men, swindlers, and forgers sought to siphon off some of this new money. Vidocq specialized in cases of financial irregularities. Still believing that it took a thief to catch a thief, he hired investigators who had committed the same crimes they would now solve. Vidocq offered his clients plaques saying they were under the protection of “Vidocq’s Information Bureau.” The small fee it cost was well worth it, for no criminal in France wanted to rob a place protected by Vidocq.

  Like the modern private eye, Vidocq also handled domestic problems. Husbands and wives who suspected their spouses of infidelity hired the agency to find out whether such suspicions were accurate. If a spouse or an employee had disappeared, Vidocq’s men would try to find the individual or determine if he or she had met with foul play. His new offices included a laboratory as well as Vidocq’s extensive files, which were open to only a few trusted employees.

  Vidocq still faced difficulties with the uniformed police, many of whom were jealous of him. His further successes in solving crime only infuriated them more, and they went so far as to plant compromising objects and letters in his office before raiding it. But Vidocq was always able to foil these schemes and divert false accusations. In answer to the charge that his agents robbed people in the street, for example, he ordered his men to wear suede gloves on duty to show that it was impossible for them to pick pockets.

  At the end of November 1839, the police raided the Office of Intelligence and carried off its files. The newspapers reported that more than half were secret documents of the Sûreté that should not have been in private hands. Vidocq promptly filed a lawsuit against the prefect of police, Paul Delessert, a man new to the job, with little experience in law enforcement. The head of the Sûreté responded by arresting Vidocq on December 23. He spent that Christmas in a Paris jail, although Mme. Vidocq was allowed to bring a roasted goose with trimmings and have dinner with him. In February, Vidocq was acquitted of all charges and was commended by the court as a man of honor.

  The police were further embarrassed when Prefect Delessert’s brother, Maurice, a wealthy banker, was robbed of seventy-five thousand francs. When the police could not find the thief, Maurice, using a pseudonym, turned to Vidocq for help. Vidocq, who was not deceived about his new client’s identity, took personal charge of the case. Through his underworld informants, he found out where the loot was located and made his own deal with the robbers: in return for the money, he would not expose their identities. Seventy-two hours a
fter he got the case, Vidocq returned the money to Maurice Delessert, grandly refusing to take a fee. He sent a letter explaining the matter to Prefect Delessert. The letter “leaked” and appeared in a newspaper, letting all Paris know who was the city’s greatest detective.

  In the last two decades of his life, Vidocq took up a new career, writing novels based — with considerable exaggeration, if not outright invention — on his experiences as an investigator. He published the first of them, Les voleurs (The Thieves), in 1836. He seems to have undertaken the book partly to make money and also to publicize his agency. Its success made Vidocq a trailblazer in another field: the first author of best-selling crime fiction.

  Les voleurs was a virtual how-to of crime. Vidocq showed how thieves broke into houses and offices using short swords of the finest steel, explained how pickpockets filed their fingers to increase their sensitivity of touch, and warned brothel patrons that many of the rooms had hidden peepholes so that when they were engaged in lovemaking, someone could enter the room and rifle their wallets. He described the nearly invisible dots that sharpers used to mark playing cards. He also cautioned people about beginning a correspondence with strangers who were in fact forgers hoping to get a sample of their handwriting.

  Age eventually slowed even Vidocq. At age seventy-five, in 1847, he closed his detective agency, though he still took on cases for favorite clients. Seven years later, he suffered a paralytic stroke. He dictated his will and then died on May 11, 1854, just a month short of his eighty-second birthday. His epitaph could have been his speech to French lawmakers in which he idealized himself: “I have the consolation of having remained an honest man amid the darkness of perversion and the atmosphere of crime. I have fought for the defense of order, in the name of justice as soldiers fight for the defense of their country, beneath the flag of their regiment. I had no epaulettes, but I ran as many risks as they, and I exposed my life every day as they do.” 17 Before his body was even removed from his home, the Paris police arrived to confiscate his files and records.