MDDM23: A Certain Well-Known Gentleman-Detective ...

[Dave Monroe]

See, as you well know, Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the
Virtuoso: Spectacle, Skill, and Self-Promotion in
Paris During the Age of Revolution (Berkeley: U of Cal
P, 1998), Ch. 3, "Vidocq, Detective: Eugène-François
Vidocq (1775–1857)," e.g. ...

   "The first half of Vidocq’s Mémoires, like
Rousseau’s Confessions, reads like a picaresque novel.
According to his Mémoires, Vidocq as a boy led an
extremely disorderly life.... While quite young, he
ran away from home to join a circus, the director and
featured performer of which was the famous magician
Nicolas-Philippe Ledru, who called himself Comus,
after the Roman god of revelry. After a while Vidocq
defected to a Polichinelle (Punch and Judy) show and
then went to work for an itinerant peddler. Eventually
he returned home but could not stay away from fights,
taverns, or girls. Not yet sixteen, he and his family
agreed that he would try to acquire some discipline in
the army."

[...]

   "Most of the few firm dates we have in the
subsequent decade of Vidocq’s life are the dates of
his incarcerations: Recording dates is a function of
established society, and established society had
little knowledge of Vidocq except when it held him
captive...."

[...]

"... Vidocq himself only boasts of his skill at
certain kinds of misdeeds: fighting with men who have
wronged him, assuming false identities, escaping from
jail. These were victimless crimes, or, to Vidocq’s
way of thinking, not crimes at all, since he was only
avenging offenses against himself and since society
had no legitimate reason to keep him locked up.
Similarly, glorifiers of outlaws generally take care
to present their heroes as having committed only
certain kinds of crime—justifiable ones.
   "Probably the most common justification offered is
that society gave them no real choice...."

[...]

   "In the second half of the eighteenth century there
were many in France who wanted to break their chains.
Thieves, soldiers of fortune, pirates, smugglers,
black marketeers, sharpers, adventurers, rogues,
adulterers, pornographers, libelists, clandestine
publishers, social critics, prophets, deists,
Freemasons, physiocrats, republicans, and other rebels
teemed there. In 1789 these rebels broke out in
revolution. The French Revolution was the overturning
of constituted society, not just by forward-looking
idealists but also by reactionaries in the literal
sense of the word, by all sorts of people opposed in
all sorts of ways to constituted society.
   "Soon the rebels began to celebrate the triumph of
the outlaw-hero. In their most potent symbolic action,
the revolutionaries tore down the Bastille, a
notorious prison...."

[...]

   "It may be ironic but it also makes perfect sense
that successful rebels, who know from their own
experience how dangerous such people can be, will,
once in power, devote a lot of energy to law and order
in general and to preventing in particular the rise of
such people as they themselves have been. The first
attempt to create a national police force in England
was made by Oliver Cromwell. In France, the
quarter-century between the outbreak of Revolution and
the fall of Napoleon was a period in which many sorts
of rebels won victories against lawful society, and
after their victories many of the rebels turned into
anti-rebels.
   "They also hired outlaws as law enforcers. The
Napoleonic regime hired the outlaw Vidocq as a prison
informer, promoted him to undercover police officer,
and then put him in charge of a new detective
department, the first such department in the history
of European policing, all within the space of three
years."

[...]

"Born a member of honest society, he became an outlaw,
then a member of outlaw society, and eventually an
outlaw to outlaw society. At that point, not
surprisingly, honest society showed a reluctance to
reassimilate him; it received him only provisionally,
on the negative principle that an enemy of my enemy is
my friend. Since he was determined to live by taking
advantage of people, better that he take advantage of
other malefactors than of honest citizens. Vidocq the
detective came into being not as the negation but as
the mirror-image of Vidocq the outlaw.
   "An unusual government provided the mirror. The
revolutionary regime headed by the ex-rebel Napoleon,
and seconded by other ex-rebels such as Fouché,
manifested a singular indifference toward the pasts of
talented people offering their services to it...."

[...]

   "Although Vidocq the outlaw had acquired his job as
a policeman in an outlaw regime, when the regime of
Louis XVIII, which regarded itself as the legitimate
one, replaced the Napoleonic regime in 1814, it
retained Vidocq. He had been an outlaw, but not a
political one. His apolitical stance benefited him at
the beginning of the Restoration and then harmed him
at the end of it. By 1827, Henry had retired, and
others who had supported him were gone as well. In
their places were partisans who expected their
subordinates to be both royalists and good Catholics.
Vidocq, for his part, did not respect their
professional abilities. Thanks to his outlaw past, he
had a thorough knowledge of criminals, their methods,
their milieu, and their mentality, which was essential
to his success as a police detective. The lesson of
Vidocq was that to duplicate this success one had to
acquire that knowledge. It may be ironic but it also
makes perfect sense that an accomplished outlaw would
have introduced into the police the specialty of
detective.
   "The modern detective had forerunners in the
eighteenth-century police. But the specialty did not
develop then...."

[...]

   "The first detective force in Europe may have been
London’s Bow Street Runners. In 1749, Henry Fielding,
the novelist turned magistrate who heard cases in a
courtroom on Bow Street, organized a group of
thief-takers...."

[...]

   "The emergence of the detective as a specialist
within the police and the detective-hero as a
distinctive figure in literature took place during a
period in which outlaws triumphed over established
society, that is, during an age of revolution; for the
triumphant outlaws, once in power, became obsessed
with ferreting out new outlaws. Thus it was Vidocq
who, during his tenure as chef de la Sûreté,
established the detective department as an enduring
part of Western police forces, and who, in his
Mémoires, established the detective-hero as an
enduring type in Western literature."

[...]

   "Literary historians who have studied the detective
story credit Vidocq’s Mémoires with having had a
decisive influence on the creation of that genre...."

[...]

   "Americans may be interested in the origins of
their own famous police detective agency, the Federal
Bureau of Investigation: It was founded in 1908 by the
attorney general of the United States, Charles Joseph
Bonaparte, second cousin of Napoleon III and
great-nephew of Napoleon I."

http://escholarship.cdlib.org/ucpress/metzner.xml?part=5&display=standard&style=generic.css

--- John Bailey <johnbonbailey at hotmail.com> wrote:
> 
> I took this as a reference to E.F. Vidocq, often
> considered the first modern detective, though he was
> born in 1775. 'Nother anachronism?
> http://www.vidocq.org/vidocq.html

Forgetting things in the frenzy here, thanks ...

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