Sostratus:
Well, answer my questions. I will not detain you long.
Minos:
Say on, but be brief; I have other cases waiting for me.
Sostratus:
The deeds of my life – were they my own choice, or were they decreed by fate?
Minos:
Decreed, of course.
Sostratus:
Then all of us, whether we passed for honest men or rogues, were the instruments of fate in all we did?
Minos:
Certainly, Clotho prescribes the conduct of every man at his birth. [Clotho is one of the Three Fates in ancient Greek mythology, responsible for spinning the thread of human life and making decisions on men’s fate.]
Sostratus:
Now suppose a man commits murder under compulsion of a power which he cannot resist, an executioner, for instance, at the bidding of a judge or a bodyguard or that of a tyrant. Who is the murderer according to you?
Minos:
The judge, of course, or the tyrant. As well ask whether the sword is guilty, which is but the tool of his anger which is the prime mover in the affair.
Sostratus:
I am indebted to you for further illustration of my argument. Again, a slave sent by his master brings me gold or silver. To whom am I to be grateful? Who goes down on my tablets as benefactor?
Minos:
The sender. The bringer is but his minister.
Sostratus:
Observe then your injustice! You punish us who are but the slaves of Clotho’s bidding, and reward these who do but minister to another’s beneficence. For it will never be said that it was in our power to gainsay the irresistible ordinances of fate!
Minos:
Ah, Sostratus, look closely enough and you will find plenty of inconsistencies beside these. However, I see you are no common pirate, but a philosopher in your way; so much you have gained by your questions. Let him go, Hermes, he shall not be punished after that.
Clemenceau would let out a large roar of laughter after recounting the story from the pen of the ancient satirist, with a caveat that if taken seriously, there would not be a prison in the country. One thing he loved, practised and admired in others was a well-constructed argument. He won most of his but not always.
He and his friend Célestin Hennion (the country’s best intelligence policeman and soon to become Director of General Security), would take that passage and discuss its implications within the context of their own opinions and beliefs. How much did destiny and fate play a role in the ebb and flow of the tides of men’s affairs, as opposed to free will?
Hennion liked to quote Machiavelli in The Prince: “He says that Fortune only rules one half of man’s fate, the other half resides in their own will. He reminds the reader that Fortune favours the strong or even violent hand, the more aggressive and bold young man rather than the timid elder.”
“Well, then, Hennion, that puts you in the favoured position as I could be described as elder – but certainly not timid. We consider destiny as a sequence of events that is inevitable and unchangeable. Many Greek legends and tales tell us the futility of trying to outmanoeuvre an inexorable fate that has been correctly predicted. Can that possibly be the case?”
“I suppose that precludes any effective intervention from man? If we accepted that notion, well, then, we would resign our positions right now. So can we seriously believe that fate is destiny? A power or agency that predetermines and orders the course of events?”
“Truly neither of us could ever have predicted that we would be in our respective public offices at this time,” said Clemenceau, “particularly if you look back and put it into the context of both of our roles and stances in the Dreyfus case. Given the tides of that affair, at least in the early days, more than likely disgrace and exile should have been our lot.”
“But can we see the hand of fate in that?” asked Hennion.
“Perhaps. Or was it because our collective will did not cave in under the most powerful forces against us? We survived and thrived. But I still ask myself what force of destiny or fate decreed the sequence of events that all but destroyed Alfred Dreyfus?”
“Yes, even the great and perceptive Machiavellian theory cannot explain or encompass such foul injustice. It does not fit the compass.”
For all their philosophising, both men were of necessity pragmatists. They accepted that the preservation of law and order was paramount.
THE IMPACT OF THE ‘BLOND GIANT’ ON POLICING
Clemenceau liked to joke about himself being “Le premier flic de France” (‘the chief cop of France’) though he knew, and proved it when he made him Director of General Security, that was rightfully Hennion’s crown.
He and Hennion had many urgent issues to deal with, among which was the further reform and centralisation of the police force, the vast increase in crime in Paris and also in the provinces. The port city of Marseilles was becoming a problem both on the streets and in the matter of organising and controlling the police force. There was also a growing swell of civil protest by the wine growers in the Southern region which was being supported by the municipal authorities. It was of course being exploited by political factions including radical socialists and anarchists.
The blond, tall and handsome Hennion, nicknamed Le géant blond (the blond giant), was just the man to tackle any one or all of the problems. Born in 1862, son of a farm labourer, he joined the army at the age of 18 and campaigned in the 110th infantry from 1880-5 in Tunisia. He joined the police in 1886 and at 24 was an inspector in the specialised railway squads. He had a rapid rise through the ranks and was moved into intelligence work where he investigated organisations intent on overthrowing the Third Republic. He was engaged in surveillance on spies and investigated General Boulanger, once seemingly poised for a coup d’état.
He was appointed Police Commissioner in Verdun in 1890 to study the functioning of the police in the provinces, then Special Commissioner of the Police in Paris in 1893. During the 1890s he investigated the counter-evidence provided by Georges Piquart during the Dreyfus case, becoming a strong supporter of Dreyfus. Despite political pressure, he was one of the few police to seek the truth. At the retrial of Dreyfus in Rennes, he was responsible for his safety and keeping order in the city.
He was responsible for the security of Félix Faure, President of the Republic (1895-1899), especially during his travels in Russia. In September 1901 he thwarted an attack against the Tsarina during the second visit to France of Czar Nicholas II, and in 1905 he foiled an assassination attempt on Alfonso XIII, King of Spain, when an anarchist’s bomb was thrown at him as he led a procession in Paris with President Loubet of France.
On January 28th 1907 he was appointed Director of General Security by Clemenceau. He was part of a modernist movement within the French Republic with Aristide Briand and Louis Lepine. He advocated great reforms and improvements in the police forces, modernising them both administratively and operationally with the introduction of mobile brigades, vice squads and forensic services, and the utilising of all modern methods of communication, telegraph, telephone and the establishment of fingerprinting and photographic archives.
With Clemenceau he also implemented more rigorous and exacting recruitment and promotion standards and more central control of the municipal police force. Hennion was, above all, concerned with the ‘judicial’ or criminal police where there was a lot to do to institute a professional service adapted to the conditions of the modern world. But also he had long been preoccupied with the recruitment and training of all police, inspired by his own experience and Clemenceau’s assessment in 1906:
The wielding of authority is always a delicate matter; the more so, in a democratic regime where the borderline of respect necessary for the liberty of others is easily overstepped. The function of the police is almost entirely concerned with imposing constraints on the liberty of some for the protection of others.
One seems to find it natural, while dem
anding a fairly long training period for most state employees, even if their employment requires more routine than initiative, to throw young policemen straight into work dealing with all manner of material and moral interests, after nothing more than a feeble exam which hardly allows one to judge the most rudimentary extent of their knowledge.
They are given no effective guide or directives to help them in a task where they frequently dispose of the interests, liberty and honour of their fellow citizens who they are called upon to counsel and punish. This is why we need a school of police. A tentative start has been made; it must be extended. It is truly strange that at the start of the 20th century, after 35 years of the Republic, we should still need to ask for an institution to teach theory and practice to men destined for a profession that has no equal in its complexity.
Hennion established proper training, notably the School of Professional Practice in the Préfecture de Police. He wanted to teach the police “how to think for themselves and appreciate the importance of their function and the services which they could offer the community.” He wanted a police school that would live up to its name.
In training, use was made of film of typical Paris street scenes and events that enabled instructors both to elicit the students’ response and teach them the correct ways for the police to intervene – whether dealing with a brawl, street fight or accident. And of course there was the use of film for surveillance.
Other reform concerned the promotion system. He had two main aims here – to ensure promotion took place on clearly defined terms and to link promotion to higher professional qualifications.
It was but a few decades before that Yves Guyot, journalist, politician and economist, wrote about a police commissioner, not untypical of the time, and one whose type Hennion wanted to prevent ever getting into the position again. According to Guyot:
There is a man in certain communities who nobody calls by his name, but by his title. The administration chose him from amongst the absinthe drinkers, chasers after women and drunkards whose habits prevent them from taking part honourably in social life in order to earn their living. Pushed out of the army, good for nothing, good enough for everything. This villainous, cowardly, aggressive, gossiping, venomous, ignoble and superfluous being, detested and abhorred by everybody. The representative of authority, the moral order, the family and property is: the police commissioner.
It was during Louis Lepine’s long career at the head of the Préfecture that the outlines of professional police knowledge began to emerge. This was largely based on the new criminology in which France held the leading position. But if Lepine prepared the way, the most important step was taken by his immediate successor Hennion who is now considered the father of modern policing.
In 1907 Hennion had a file of newspaper reports which were clamouring for action, the consensus agreeing with a strong article published by the sensationalist and hugely popular Petit Journal which wrote that violent crimes in France had increased to unbelievable proportions, and produced the latest statistics to back it up.
The statistics quoted showed that over the past years, even when the population was not increasing significantly, criminals were never so numerous. The number of proceedings were: 114,181 in 1835; 200,000 in 1850; 300,000 in 1875; 400,000 in 1880; 500,000 in 1892; 520,868 in 1901 and 546,257 in 1906. Murders had increased by 40% – all due to the audacity of gangs, rogues and scoundrels of every kind.
The Apaches were kings of the streets. These were street gangs numbering 30,000 and consisting of young men between the ages of 15 and 20, who terrorised the capital. And according to the Petit Journal this threat was being exacerbated with weak laws, the extraordinary indulgence of the courts and insufficient numbers in the police force.
There were many causes offered for this proliferation of crime: alcohol, too much freedom in access to bars, shady hotels and “the unfortunate spirit of humanitarian sentimentality – for the criminals but not for the good people”. According to the Petit Journal, gang members were arrested and then let go or given minimal sentences when they deserved good sentences with hard labour instead of parole and reduction of sentences. When in prison they were well housed and fed, given books and not enough work. Under such conditions how could rogues fear justice? It was common for judges, so lenient on criminals, to reserve severity for the police.
“Policing on the streets has become impossible,” offered one police source.
They needed staff, ten times more than they had. The Petit Journal asked: “What more is needed for the triumph of the wicked but to see police agents accused in court by mercurial judges?”
It was as bad in the provinces where vagrants terrorised rural roads and farmers. What could 32,000 rural police do against an army of 200,000 nomads, a population of tramps wandering around rural France, some of whom terrorised locals and farmers? Rural police were primarily servants of the mayors and their duties already absorbed them. The steady increase of crime, the number of Apaches growing in cities, and tramps in the countryside only served to show the need for more police. But even if there was an increase in the police force, to effect improvement “childish humanitarianism must be given up”.
“You want to moralise the condemned and not make them suffer? If [so] work the criminals . . . work alone is moralising.” So concluded the article which conveniently ignored the fact that France, despite its undoubted high reputation in the fields of academic, literary, scientific, judicial and criminal investigation techniques had off the coast of South America in French Guiana the worst system of penal retribution in the world. While it did house inmates with abominable crimes on record including some of the above-named Apaches, there were many more who had committed relatively minor offences.
THE PROBLEM OF MARSEILLES
In the late 1860’s local administrators in Marseilles were calling for the nationalisation of the municipal police with partial support from the State on the model of Lyons. But the government refused to do it, by arguing that the largely working-class city of Marseilles did not have the same risk of political turmoil as Lyons. But that would change as the port city grew in size and there was an increase in the trafficking of prostitutes from Africa and South America. There were territorial fights between pimps controlling different sections of the red light district. Lawlessness increased on the streets.
But there were also political considerations. A socialist mayor Simeon Flaissieres was elected in Marseilles in the 1890’s. Central government was not too happy about that development.
It was time for the Sûreté to exercise control in Marseilles. And this necessity was spurred on by another event of economic and political nature. In 1907, responding to a major crisis of regional economic development, winegrowers, vinedressers and artisans in the Aude, Hérault, Gaudes and Pyrénées-Orientales took to the streets in an effort to compel the government to impose controls on the production and marketing of wine.
As a form of regional protest, it was significant in that it drew together all classes of wine producers and workers in a combined and united front. The region-wide wine-market depression in the spring and summer of 1905, causing municipal resignations and tax protests, persisted through the following two years into 1907. Between March and June 1907, a series of huge meetings and demonstrations shook the whole wine-producing south of the country.
500,000 gathered in Montpelier on June 9th. In demonstrations the image of hunger and misery recurred on the banners and symbols displayed. These symbols provided a dramatic reminder of the grinding poverty that winegrowers and workers faced. Appeals were made to the government to take action against producers of ‘fraudulent wines’.
The local populations were electrified by the revolt that galvanised the entire Midi. Proprietors lent workers wagons and horses to travel to demonstrations and train fares were also reduced to accommodate protestors. There were confrontations with troops and police. There was a massive tax strike, resignations of municipalities and a military rebe
llion following the army occupation of lower Languedoc. Departments agreed to suspend not only collection of taxes but all municipal operations.
When Clemenceau responded by arresting several of the prominent leaders of the movement and sending troops to occupy the south, tensions escalated. Police and troops were attacked and demonstrators killed by gunfire in Narbonne. These tragic events provoked a storm of reaction. The killings and the subsequent riots in Montpellier provided a turning point in the 1907 revolt.
Demonstrations died down and the government passed legislation requiring all winegrowers to declare the size of their vineyards and harvests each year. Addition of water was forbidden and a surcharge was put on sugar. By July calm had been restored.
In response, Clemenceau on the advice of Hennion set about creating in 1907 mobile brigades, one of the first being established in Marseilles.
Clemenceau had agreed that Marseilles had to be sorted out and already Hennion had succeeded in getting one of his own men in as head of the police department, who had in turn gathered together a top-quality team of men who were dedicated to criminal investigation. Hennion then got rid of the useless cronies of the municipal authority and initiated a campaign carried out by the head of police to stamp out and legally punish corruption in the force. The mayor and the Préfet did not dare protest or interfere, such was the public and media outcry against crime in the port. And the President had criticised the inadequacies of policing in the port in Parliament.
The attention of the most powerful politician and the greatest policeman in France was on Marseilles – winds of change were blowing from the direction of Paris.
5
CASINO ROYALE
MONTE CARLO, AUGUST, 1907
Murder in Monte Carlo Page 9
