by Robb, Graham
These simple means were well suited to the urban villages that made up early-nineteenth-century Paris. But the city was growing by the day: in some quartiers, even a concierge or a police spy could barely keep abreast of the influx of strangers. In the sixteen years during which Vidocq ran the Sûreté Brigade (1811–27), the population of Paris increased by over one hundred thousand. The drainage system grew by ten kilometres, the hills of rubbish turned into mountains, and streets that had never wandered far from their medieval origins reached out into the countryside like the veins of a gigantic parasite. Soon, it would take something more than mere persistence to stretch the net of public safety over the whole crime-ridden metropolis.
3. The Case of the Six Thousand Missing Criminals
20 June 1827, 6 Petite Rue Sainte-Anne
ONLY A BUREAUCRAT with a heart of stone would have felt no pity for the fifty-two-year-old man who sat alone in his office that Wednesday in June, hunched over a large desk on which a single sheet of paper remained. That musky suite of rooms under the shadow of the Sainte-Chapelle had been his home for the last sixteen years, and the little platoon of twenty-eight men and women–scribes, spies and half-reformed convicts–had been the only family he had known since he left his parents’ bakery as a boy. He had grown to love the accommodating file cabinets, the capacious wardrobe that would have been the envy of a boulevard theatre and the little galley where, at any hour of the day or night, a convict’s mistress cooked the meals that kept them on the trail of criminals.
Commissioner Henry, who had been like a father to him, had retired to devote himself to fishing, and his departure had caused a flurry of administrative manoeuvrings. In his place, the Minister had appointed a neat and tidy young man with a heart of stone, who had begun to investigate Vidocq’s distant and not-so-distant past. Rather than await the outcome of the investigations, Vidocq had decided to tender his resignation. He signed the sheet of paper, and left the office for what seemed likely to be the last time. As he passed along the glass-covered arcade, lugging a trunk full of documents, he wondered how his successor as Head of the Sûreté–an ex-convict known as Coco Lacour–would manage to match his impressive record of arrests.
Vidocq had brought to justice enough criminals to sink a prison ship. His name was a household word, and he was somewhat inconveniently famous as a master of disguise from Cherbourg to Marseille. He had solved so many cases that to the tradesmen, cab drivers, clerks and, for that matter, criminals, who read about his exploits in the newspapers, nothing seemed quite as innocent as before. That feeble old woman might be a secret agent on a case, and that loaf of bread she was carrying might be an improvised valise containing a loaded pistol and a pair of handcuffs.
It is a tribute to Vidocq’s efficiency that when he left the Sûreté, most of the mysteries that remained unsolved concerned Vidocq himself. Why, for instance, were his hands covered with blood when his former mistress Francine was found with five stab-wounds inflicted by his knife–a knife, admittedly, that she later claimed in a signed statement to have borrowed for a suicide attempt? Why was an ex-convict, who was known to be a habitual gambler, put in charge of the Police des Jeux, which supervised casinos? And how did he manage to retire from the Sûreté in June 1827, with almost half a million francs, when his annual salary was only five thousand francs?
One case was so mysterious that it seems to have escaped attention altogether, and it is especially unfortunate that the lack of evidence makes it the shortest case of all.
The mystery is this: the number of people Vidocq arrested each year far exceeds the annual number of convictions for crimes against the person or against property in the entire Seine département. In one year, the Sûreté Brigade arrested seven hundred and seventy-two murderers, thieves, forgers, conmen, escaped convicts and miscellaneous miscreants. Even subtracting the forty-six unexplained arrests made ‘by special warrant’, and the two hundred and twenty-nine ‘vagabonds and thieves’ who were expelled from Paris, this leaves a very large number of criminals who do not appear in the official statistics. Even at a conservative estimate, in the sixteen years of Vidocq’s reign, the number of criminals arrested by the Sûreté, but unaccounted for in the official statistics, is approximately 6,350. At this rate, it would have taken fewer than fifteen Vidocqs to arrest every criminal in the country.
If Commissioner Henry had devoted his well-earned retirement to writing his memoirs instead of fishing in the Seine, he might have explained that Vidocq was more dangerous as a detective than he ever was as a crook, and that, by casting the eerie light of crime over the whole city, he created a demand for people like himself: legalized avengers who would give the taxpayers their money’s worth by cleaning up the streets. He might have granted Vidocq his proper place in history, and hailed him as the man who reinvented crime-fighting as a means of controlling the innocent population…But, as Vidocq may have reflected that June morning, as he set down his trunk on the Quai des Orfèvres to take a swig from his brandy-flask, a true genius is never recognized by his contemporaries.
4. The Case of the Mysterious Unpleasantness
17 October 1840, 13 Galerie Vivienne
SOME TIME AFTER Vidocq’s departure from the Sûreté, that characteristically Parisian breed known as badauds (‘gawkers’), who had nothing better to do than stand and stare, as though any object, whether living or lifeless, might become interesting if stared at long enough, began to notice Xs–sometimes accompanied by Os–marked in white chalk on the walls of certain houses. If a particularly patient badaud had lingered within sight of one of the single Xs, he might eventually have seen a man or a woman take a piece of white chalk and inscribe an O beside the X before disappearing down the street or behind the brick column of a public urinal; and, if he followed the mysterious defacer of public property, he might in due course have found himself in one of the plusher parts of Paris, under a glassy arcade thronged with people who, like himself, had nothing better to do than stand and stare.
The Galerie Vivienne had been built in 1823 as a speculative venture. It quickly became one of the busiest arcades on the Right Bank. On a summer evening, Parisians out for a stroll would leave the dazzling sun on the boulevard and plunge into its gleaming shadows to feast their eyes on chocolates and pralines and miniature armies of petits-fours, or to gaze at the frills and ornaments that were displayed like holy relics under the nymphs and goddesses of the rotunda. A man could smoke a cigarette there on a rainy day while examining the curves and unexpected vistas of the marble galleries and the pretty women who came to shop for lingerie and the latest fashions. Like an elegant marquise, the Galerie Vivienne had a sort of indestructible frivolity, and its fame as the centre of Paris fashions spread far beyond the city. The words ‘Galerie Vivienne’ appeared like a sacred motif on beautifully wrapped bandboxes that were delivered to ladies in provincial towns when their husbands were away. It was, in short, the sort of place a woman could safely visit on her own without arousing suspicion.
That Saturday afternoon, a young woman, who will have to remain nameless, entered the Galerie Vivienne and passed through the monumentally respectable entrance of no. 13. She climbed the magnificent, swirling staircase where windows set high in the marbled wall made it possible to look onto the stairs without being seen. She knocked at a door and was ushered into the comfortable office of the man who was described on the metal plaque, the headed notepaper and in countless advertisements as ‘Ex-chief of the special Sûreté police, which he directed for 20 years with undisputed success’.
The Bureau of Universal Intelligence at 13 Galerie Vivienne was the world’s first private detective agency, founded two decades before Allan Pinkerton, ‘the Vidocq of the West’, launched his National Detective Agency in Chicago. It offered a range of discreet services: ‘Prosecutions and debt-collection, intelligence of every sort, surveillance, and investigations in the interests of business and families.’ Other agencies had sprung up in imitation, but none of them had prosp
ered, as the Bureau’s prospectus cheerfully explained:
All those who tried to imitate me have come to grief, and were bound to fail. ‘The Alarm-Bell’ was melted down in the prisons of Mézières. ‘The Lighthouse of Commerce’ was snuffed out in the cells of Bicêtre. ‘The Illuminator’ shed so much light on its own shady dealings that it went to jail for several months. Their successors will inevitably fail in their turn.
To some minds, there was a touch of menace in the Bureau’s advertising. It was almost as if a blackmailer had extended his operation to the entire commercial world of Paris…
Certain businessmen who subscribed to my Bureau for several years, and then saw fit to discontinue their subscription, found that, no sooner had they dispensed with my experience and advice, than they fell prey to rogues.
But since the Bureau performed such useful services, and since a more liberal government was preventing the police from interfering in family affairs, it enjoyed some powerful protection. It had a huge database of file-cards on every known criminal–and several thousand law-abiding citizens too–and a team of specialized sleuths: ‘the Cyclops’, ‘the Faun’, ‘the Man-about-Town’, and a very tall detective who could peer through first-floor windows without using a ladder. Even when the Bureau was raided, and more than two thousand old Sûreté files relating to the years 1811–27 were confiscated, its filing-system was feared by politicians as much as Vidocq’s fists were feared by criminals.
The Bureau’s ‘undisputed success’ had not come easily. The house rules, which were prominently displayed in the director’s office, gave some idea of how difficult it was to work with agents who had acquired their skills and manners in prison-cells and slums:
Employees must always be dressed in a clean and respectable fashion, and especially not have muddy shoes.
Employees must be equipped at all times with necessary items such as knives, rulers, pens, etc., and must always leave their desk tidy.
Drunkenness and gambling, those two shameful vices, will be severely repressed. Eating and drinking, smoking and chewing tobacco are forbidden in the offices, as is anything unconnected with the service.
Any employee who writes on the walls, notice-boards, windows, etc., will be punished with a fine three times the cost of the damage.
Documents and notes are to be turned face down in the office so that prying eyes cannot read them. Anyone who can prove that his comrade has divulged the details of a case to him will be rewarded with the day’s pay of the one who blabbed.
The final rule would have been of particular interest to a badaud. It pertained to ‘external operations’. When a house was under surveillance, the agent was to mark the nearest street corner with an X. ‘To this effect, white chalk will always be at his disposal.’ When he left the house to follow a subject or to ‘satisfy a need’, he was to mark the wall with an O. In this way, the director could monitor his agents’ activities and take punitive action where necessary.
It is fortunate, in a sense, that the Bureau was closed down in 1843 and its files dispersed. Some of the paperwork found its way to government offices and, from there, eventually, to second-hand bookshops and archival collections. One of the salvaged records appears to be the office copy of a letter that the young woman in the Galerie Vivienne had received that Saturday. (In 1840, there were six deliveries a day, so that a letter posted in Paris to an address in the city before 9 a.m. would arrive before noon.)
The letter was sufficiently disconcerting to bring the addressee to Vidocq’s office. It was written on the usual headed paper, with the Bureau’s motto beneath the address:
20 FRANCS A YEAR
Give protection from the wiles of the wiliest rogues.
Mademoiselle,
Having a matter to discuss that concerns you and that might cause you some unpleasantness and expense, please take the trouble to drop by my office on receipt of this letter.
Respectful regards,
It would be too much to hope that a case requiring such discretion should be transparent in all its details after so much time. The envelope has not survived, and the woman’s address is unknown. There is as much chance of identifying Vidocq’s client as there is of seeing Vidocq himself emerge from the offices of the historical preservation society that now occupies no. 13 Galerie Vivienne. However, the Bureau’s copy of the letter at least makes it possible to follow the progress of the case over the following week.
Several notes were scrawled across it. The first, in thick, clumsy characters suggesting a quill gripped by a fist, says: ‘She won’t pay more than 2 francs a month.’ Then, in another hand, ‘Wrote on 19 Feb. 1841 to pay’. Another note, in the first hand, says, ‘A note to find out the lady’s possition [sic].’ The final note says, ‘Made note on 23 February’.
No further information is available. The precise nature of the ‘unpleasantness’ to which the young woman was exposed must remain a mystery, and we shall never know whether or not her two francs a month were considered sufficient payment, nor in what manner the Bureau of Universal Intelligence intended to offer her protection from ‘the wiles of the wiliest rogues’…
5. The Case of the Bogus Revolution
6 June 1832, Île de la Cité, to 11 May 1857, Rue Saint-Pierre-Popincourt
ONLY A MAN who had hidden himself in piles of rubbish and watched the same door or alleyway for days on end would have known how many obscure dramas were wiped from the history of Paris by demolition and urban renewal. Street corners and crossroads were the synapses of a gigantic, convoluted brain, and when, in 1838, Prefect Rambuteau began to cut through the living tissue of ancient lanes to create the broad, hygienic street that bears his name, large parts of the city’s memory were lost without trace.
Since Vidocq was occasionally employed on special missions, even after the demise of his detective agency, he could certainly have written something more revealing than his ‘pocketbook for decent people’, Thieves: A Physiology of Thievish Behaviour and Language (1837). He might, for instance, have written a practical manual for army officers and would-be heads of state. He might have shown that anyone who wished to conquer France should first control the capital, and that, in order to control the capital, he should assemble at certain key points in the city the following items: two carts, some tables, chairs, bed-frames and doors, several mattresses, and some well-chosen rubbish untouched by rag-pickers. Since few streets were more than seven metres wide, a collection of such materials could quickly reach a first or a second floor. In this way, a whole battalion could be held at bay.
In a later chapter, he might have shown that in order to confirm the change of regime, and to damp down the fires that had forged the new administration, the head of state should provoke another revolution, and then repress it.
On 5 June 1832, one of the last victims of the cholera epidemic, the popular republican orator General Lamarque was being taken to his final resting-place by one of the largest funeral processions ever seen in Paris. Rumours had been spreading since the morning that the funeral would be the occasion of a royalist revolt. The liberal monarchy, which had been established by a three-day Revolution in July 1830, was threatened by discontented royalists on one side and disgruntled republicans on the other. Strangely, though, despite its fear of a further republican uprising or a royalist counter-revolution, the government did nothing to prevent the crowds from assembling, and when a colossal man appeared on a horse, waving a red flag and a Phrygian bonnet, no soldier or policeman intervened until panic had begun to spread.
Three hours later, half of Paris was choked with barricades, and a handful of intrepid men, dressed in the style of blood-red revolutionaries, were calling on citizens to resist the royalist revolt.
A cynic might have said that this chaotic revolt was a stroke of luck for the new regime. By dawn, many of the rioters had been killed or captured, and the rebellion was concentrated in the narrow streets around the church of Saint-Merri. It was there, as readers of Victor Hugo’s Les M
isérables know, that the final scenes of that bloody drama were acted out. Order was restored by government troops, who fired cannon at the bulwarks of mattresses, and smashed their way through partition walls to fire on the barricades from upper windows. Any general would have realized that a battle concentrated in such a small area would not eradicate the threat for good. Many of the troublemakers slipped through the cordon and escaped across the rooftops. But there was no doubt that, after the events of 5–6 June 1832, Paris was safer for the monarchy than before.
SURVEYING PARIS that morning from the Île de la Cité, a keen observer would have seen the clouds of gun-smoke and pulverized rubble rise over the impenetrable mass of roofs to the north. But he might also have heard sounds of fighting closer to hand. While the massacre was taking place across the river at Saint-Merri, barricades had appeared in the narrow lanes of the island, behind the Quai des Orfèvres. They were first noticed at about ten o’clock that morning, by which time, according to every history of the 1832 revolt, all resistance was confined to the Right Bank.
As they retreated from the massacre and fled across the river, several bands of rioters were alerted to the presence of barricades on the Île de la Cité by men who seemed to have a precise knowledge of the ebb and flow of the battle. Since the barricades occupied a position of clear strategic importance between the government buildings on the Right Bank and the army of starving workers and seditious students in the Latin Quarter, the insurrection was quickly reignited in the heart of the old city.