The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (11 page)

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 after 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.

iv

It can be argued that all detective fiction owes something to Vidocq. Certainly his outsize persona intrigued some of France’s greatest and most popular writers, among them Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Eugène Sue. Balzac used the character Vautrin, modeled after Vidocq, in several books of his massive sequence of novels,
La comédie humaine.
At one point, Vautrin explains crime and the world:

It is a strange mud pit.… If you get that dirt on you while you’re driving around in a carriage, you’re a very respectable fellow, but if it spatters all over you while you slog along on foot, then you’re a good-for-nothing rogue. Make the mistake of grabbing anything out of the mud, no matter how insignificant, and they’ll pillory you in the courts of law. But steal millions, and they’ll point you out as a hero, in the very best houses. That’s an ethical system you pay the cops and the judges thirty million a year to keep in good working order. It’s just great!
¹⁸
Vautrin also offers Balzac’s famous observation on wealth: “The secret of all great fortunes… is always some forgotten crime — forgotten, mind you, because it’s been properly handled.”
¹⁹

Victor Hugo, author of what has proved to be the most durable of nineteenth-century French novels,
Les misérables,
also knew Vidocq personally and is said to have modeled both of the main characters of his great book after Vidocq: Inspector Javert, the relentless policeman, and his quarry the ex-convict Jean Valjean represented the two sides of Vidocq’s nature and career.

The works of these authors were best sellers among a new class of reader that had developed along with the growth of literacy in nineteenth-century France. As the reading public grew, mass-circulation newspapers and journals sprang up to fulfill the demand for news, commentary, and popular literature. Newspapers printed sensational stories of crime and scandal, called
faits divers;
to improve their tales, authors of
faits divers
wrote in a style more usual for fiction than for journalism. Henry de Roure, a journalist of the Belle Époque, wrote that the reader sitting down to read a
fait divers
“licks his chops. Believes himself to experience one by one — and with what transports of joy! — the emotions of an unfortunate woman attacked at night and cut into pieces with successive blows of a sword; then, in trying to enter into the character of the assassin, he tastes the incomparable psychological pleasures which [the reader], as a practical man, has never experienced directly.”
²⁰

Seeing the popularity of such lively journalism, the newspaper publisher Émile de Girardin decided to publish fiction outright and developed the
feuilleton,
or serial. In 1836, the first issue of his
La Presse
contained the premier installment of an exciting novel with the promise of additional chapters to come. The French public took to the
feuilletons
with such enthusiasm that they became virtually obligatory for any newspaper trying to increase its circulation. Major authors’ works often appeared first in this format and were afterward released in book form. Perhaps the most popular of the
romans feuilletons,
or serial novels, was Eugène Sue’s
Les mystères de Paris,
which tripled the circulation of
Le Journal des Débats,
where it appeared between 1842 and 1843. The author received an offer of 100,000 francs for his next serial even before a word was written, a fantastic figure for the day, making Sue one of the highest-paid authors in France.