The road of history is cobbled with names, of people and events and ideas, that are largely forgotten, but without whom our modern world would look very different. You’ll surely have heard of Cyrillic text, but how about Glagolitic? You know about Jan van Eyck, but what about Hubert van Eyck? Alexander von Humboldt rings a bell, but what about Baron Valvasor? My favorite type of history writing does not rehash what is already known, fleshing it out, but instead shines light upon the overlooked, the forgotten, the lost. They are never truly lost — specialists will know their stories. But the thoughtful, curious generalist? Not so much.
I wear several hats. Art historian, writer, specialist in art crime, Slovenologist (ask me about the delights of moving to Slovenia, and I’ll be happy to share), to name a few. My early interest in art crime required my adding the study of criminology to my base knowledge of art history and the art trade. And in the course of this study, I came across two figures who are too little-known to non-criminologists, but without whom the study of crime and how it is investigated — the procedures you see on just about every detective or cop show on TV — would not have existed. One is a Frenchman named Eugene Francois Vidocq. The other is an American, born in Scotland, named Allan Pinkerton. Over the next two columns, we’ll look at each of their lives and influences on the art of investigation, studying and solving crime, the methodology of which was entwined with the history of espionage and spy tradecraft.
Vidocq is more of a household name in the Francophone world, and it comes as a surprise that there are not more novels and dark, brooding period television dramas about him. He certainly inspired many a writer, including Joseph Conrad (it’s no coincidence that the protagonist of "The Secret Agent" is the similarly-named Verloc), Victor Hugo, Balzac and Edgar Allan Poe (who is credited with the first detective novel, starring a Frenchman named Dupin). Born in 1775, Vidocq has the profile of the ideal modern detective, a former criminal with a dark, seedy past that comes back to haunt him, who determined to channel his talents for good. He founded La Surete Nationale, the French national police force, acting as its first director, and also running what is considered the first private detective agency. This makes him the first “private eye” (but more on that term when we look at his parallel figure, Pinkerton).
Born to a successful baker and dealer in corn, Vidocq proved an excellent swordsman and enjoyed a good fight, earning the nickname le Vautrin (the wild boar). His first known criminal act was stealing his parents’ silverware. In what would become a codified behavior pattern for a certain type of criminal, he blew through the profits in a single day. His father knew what he’d done and had the police arrest him, keeping him in jail for two weeks. The lesson didn’t take. Only 14 years old, he swiped the money box from his family bakery and made a break for it, ending up in Ostend. Trying to arrange passage to the fledgling United States, he was instead ripped off by local toughs and was left without a cent. He found work with a traveling carnival, oddly pretending to be a cannibal by eating raw meat. He wound his way home and was forgiven by his parents.
Then he went the way of many a raucous youth of the period and joined the army in 1791. His abilities were on display there, too. Within the first six months, he had dueled 15 people and slain two of them. He was indeed a prodigious swordsman. He also managed to get thrown into prison, albeit briefly, but long enough for him to design a successful prison break for one of the others incarcerated. He fought for France against Austria in 1792, and won honors, but even there, he could not force himself to behave. During a promotion ceremony, he actually challenged an officer to a duel. When the officer refused, Vidocq punched him. This insubordination could have come with a death sentence, and Vidocq didn’t wait around to find out.
A devout womanizer (who often wound up dueling the unhappy husbands of his targets), he did marry at 19, but this, too, didn’t stick. He started his more formal criminal career in Brussels around 1794. His many adventures included joining a troupe of gypsies from Bohemia and spending several stints in prison, usually for assault. He proved to be both a good criminal and a good prisoner, in terms of using prison to his advantage. A thief he befriended in prison received a sudden pardon letter — only after he’d been released, did it come out that the pardon was a forgery, almost certainly by Vidocq’s hand (though he never admitted to it). One can already detect a certain noblesse in his bad behavior, having arranged someone else’s prison break and forged someone else’s pardon papers, but not bothering with his own.
Eventually deciding that he’d had enough of prison, he broke out, only to be recaptured, on several occasions. He was often helped by a lover, Francine, who then caught him with another woman . . . after she had helped him escape. Later in prison, after having been convicted of the pardon forgery (along with fellow inmate, Cesar Herbaux), he learned a French martial art, savate — one imagines that the Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr. reinterpretation of Sherlock Holmes owes a nod to Vidocq, who was a real-life expert martial artist and swordsman, in addition to being an ace detective. Vidocq would engage in various prison break attempts, some more successful than others, once dressed as a sailor, once as a nun.
After another escape, this time in 1800 with the aid of a friendly prostitute, Vidocq began to switch from criminality to the side of the law. This was a period when identifying someone was extremely difficult — officials relied on acquaintances to recognize someone, as there was no better way, as yet, to objectively know who someone was. Photography was not in play yet, and this was before another famous French investigator, Alphonse Bertillon, would invent an eponymous measurement system involving physiognomy, later to be replaced by fingerprinting and, most recently, DNA evidence. Thus, if Vidocq went unrecognized, he could morph into different identities — an issue he would seek to fix, as a policeman. From 1800-1811, he led a more or less proper, above-board existence, until he was finally spotted — and learned that he had been, in absentia, sentenced to death, and so he went on the run again. While on the lam, he was witness to the public execution of Cesar Herbaux, his former cellmate and accomplice. This proved sobering. The next time he was arrested, in 1809, he offered to help the police as an informant.
This is a key point that much of the public does not realize, even today. All police departments keep significant funds available to pay criminals to inform on other criminals. This is how the vast majority of stolen artworks are recovered, and such is the case in gaining information to solve other crimes. It is morally questionable, perhaps, but a necessary method for obtaining knowledge from the criminal grapevine. Vidocq proved a useful informer, essentially working as a spy for the Paris police, spying on other criminals in order not to be prosecuted himself. He worked off his prison sentence by spying for 21 months, during which time he was resident in prison, so as not to attract suspicion. To further keep his ratting-out under wraps, his release was arranged to look like a prison break. Vidocq had found a way to use his talents for good, and also keep on the good side of the police, who could have had him imprisoned, or even executed, for his various past crimes.
His most prominent role was founding, in 1811, a plainclothes police unit called Brigade de la Sûreté (the Security Brigade), which became an official unit in 1812. Not dressed as policemen, they could go anywhere, unnoticed, and acted as spies, but with police privileges. So successful was Vidocq’s team that Napoleon Bonaparte made it the state’s official security police force, after which time it was known as the Sûreté Nationale. This was the first official plainclothes police unit, something that is now entirely commonplace and universal around the world.
Beginning with eight agents, it ballooned to 28 by 1823, and they were referred to as “secret agents,” since they were officially police, but in civilian clothing. Hence the very term "secret agent" owes its origins to Vidocq. He preferred to work with fellow ex-convicts who knew how to fight, because they could most easily infiltrate criminal groups, maintain relationships with active criminals and think like a criminal. He developed his own training methods, specializing in disguise. In a single year, 1817, he was personally involved in 811 arrests, 15 of those arrested being assassins. His activities were considered to have, almost single-handedly (or at least, single-unit-ly), reduced crime in Paris. He was on a generous salary but also opened a private detective agency to supplement his income.
His adventures would continue, but his legend would resonate most due to literary inspirations based on his life story. He became friends with Balzac in 1822 and, aided by a ghostwriter, published his memoirs, which were a great success — the very first true crime detective memoir. Shifts in regime led to the Sûreté's renovation, this time with no agents with a criminal record permitted to serve. In 1833, Vidocq instead founded Le Bureau des Renseignements (the coyly-titled “Office of Information”), which functioned as a private detective agency crossed with a police force crossed with a mercenary group for hire, who would protect civilians against criminals in a more direct way than official police bureaucracy permitted, using criminals to fight criminals. He and his men would work as spies for the Second Republic. But Vidocq was not only a criminal, not only a crime-fighter, not only an entrepreneur (he even founded and ran a successful paper-making company and invented both indelible ink and unalterable bonded paper), but he was also literary and a theorist, publishing numerous books of essays on crime, capital punishment, the penal system and more — hence founding criminology, the study of crime and its investigation and punishment. Historians of criminology consider him to have fathered their subject, with particular nods to his creation of the formula and function of undercover work, analysis of ballistics, developing a system for keeping records during an investigation, using plaster casts to take evidence and an early form of what is called “anthropometry,” the precursor to Bertillon measurements, as a way of identifying a suspect uniquely by distinctive aspects and measurements of their body and face. He was also fairly egalitarian — the first to introduce female police agents, and he had a moral streak in him, too. He never informed on a criminal who he deemed to have stolen out of necessity.
The only thing missing is an HBO or Netflix series about his life. Television executives — you know how to reach me.
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