The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

A coroner’s jury, considering the death, was obviously unsympathetic to the police, feeling they had no right to interfere with freedom of speech. When the coroner was told the jurors were unable to agree on a verdict, he replied that they would have to stay there without food and drink until they did agree. Whereupon the jury – which consisted of respectable tradesmen – produced a verdict of justifiable homicide against the unknown person who had stabbed Constable Culley. The spectators cheered, and the jury found themselves treated as heroes. The short-term result was to increase the hostility between police and public; but the long term-result was to allow Englishmen to stand on a soap box and say whatever they liked.

In France, the whole situation would have been regarded as preposterous. They had had their official police force since the time of Louis XIV and the policeman took it for granted that he represented the king’s authority and could say and do as he liked. One result of this attitude, of course, was the French Revolution. But the infamous Chambre Ardente affair, with its revelation of mass poisoning and child-sacrifice was evidence that the French needed a police force rather more urgently than the English. (This was, of course, before the introduction of gin caused the English crime wave.) The French chief of police was also the censor of the press, and could arrest newspaper publishers and anyone who printed a ‘libellous book’. (Prohibited books were actually tried, condemned, and sent to the Bastille in a sack with a label – specifying the offence – tied to it.)

The French concentrated on the spy system to keep crime in check – a vast network of informers. M. de Sartines, the police minister under Louis XV, once had a bet with a friend that it would be impossible to slip into Paris without knowledge of the police. The friend – a judge – left Lyons secretly a month later, and found himself a room in a remote part of the city; within hours, he had received a letter by special messenger, inviting him to dinner with M. de Sartines. On another occasion, de Sartines was asked by the Vienna police to search for an Austrian robber in Paris; he was able to reply that the robber was still in Vienna, and give his exact address – at which the Vienna police found him.

The French underworld was also more organised than the British could ever hope to be. When Louis XVI married Marie Antoinette in 1770, a gang stretched cords across the street under cover of darkness, and crowds attending the celebrations stumbled over them in large numbers. Two thousand five hundred people were trampled to death in the confusion, and the pickpockets moved around rifling the corpses. But the next day, de Sartines’s men swooped on known criminals and made hundreds of arrests. They did it so swiftly that they recovered enormous quantities of stolen goods – watches, rings, bracelets, purses, jewellery – one robber had two thousand francs tied up in his handkerchief. It was an inauspicious beginning for a marriage that ended on the guillotine.

After the Revolution of 1789, the police force was disbanded – only to be formed again by Robespierre, who wanted to know what his enemies were doing. Napoleon appointed the sinister Joseph Fouché his police minister, and Fouché’s spy network became even more efficient than that of de Sartines.

Under Fouché, the chief of police in Paris was a certain M. Henry. One day in 1809, he received a visit from a powerfully-built young man called Eugene-Francois Vidocq, who offered information about certain criminals in exchange for immunity. Vidocq was totally frank with Henry; his life had been adventurous, and a hot temper and a love of pretty women had brought him more than his share of trouble with the law. He had been a smuggler, and had escaped from prison, and even from the galleys. Now he wanted a quiet life. Henry could see Vidocq felt trapped; but he wanted him to feel still more trapped, until he would do anything that was asked of him. So M. Henry declined his offer and allowed him to go.

What Vidocq had not told Henry was that he was now involved with a gang of coiners. They denounced him to the police, who called when Vidocq was in bed; he was arrested, nearly naked, on the roof. When M. Henry saw the prisoner, he felt pleased with himself; now Vidocq was well and truly trapped. Henry was now able to state his own terms. And they were that Vidocq should become a police spy and betray his associates. It was hard, but Vidocq had no alternative than to accept. He was taken to the prison of La Force, with the task of spying on his fellow prisoners. It was dangerous work, but freedom depended on doing it well. He did so well, reporting undetected crimes to M. Henry, and the whereabouts of stolen goods, that M. Henry decided to give him his freedom – as a police spy. Vidocq was loaded with chains for transfer to another prison; on the way he was allowed to escape. It made him the hero of the criminal underworld of Paris. His first task was to track down a forger named Watrin, who had escaped and totally disappeared. Cautious enquiries revealed that Watrin had left some possessions in a certain room. Vidocq waited for him to reappear, captured him after a desperate struggle, and dragged him off to M. Henry. There was a large reward. Soon after, Watrin was guillotined. So was another forger named Bouhin – the man who had denounced Vidocq to the police two years earlier. He had been arrested on Vidocq’s information.

During the next few years, Vidocq showed himself to be the most determined, efficient and enterprising police agent in Paris. His success aroused intense jealousy in the Police Prefecture, and his colleagues often denounced him as a man who was really in league with the criminals. M. Henry knew better; he knew Vidocq was too attached to his new-found security. He also knew that the rivalry between his men was the greatest threat to the efficiency of the Paris police. Every area in the city had its local station, and there was little co-operation between them. So when Vidocq suggested forming a small force of men who could move freely anywhere in the city, Henry immediately seized upon the idea. Vidocq was allowed four helpers, all chosen by himself – naturally, he chose criminals. There was fierce opposition from all the local police departments, who objected to strangers on their ‘patches’, but Henry refused to be moved. Vidocq’s little band was called the Security – Sureté – and it became the foundation of the French national police force of today.

In 1833, Vidocq was forced to retire, because a new chief of police objected to a Sureté made up entirely of criminals and ex-criminals. He immediately became a private detective – the first in the world – and wrote his Memoirs. He became a close friend of writers, including Balzac, who modelled his character Vautrin on Vidocq.

For the modern reader, the most astonishing thing about Vidocq’s Memoirs is that the crimes were so singularly un-vicious. This is not to say that criminals were not perfectly capable of murder; only that there was a complete absence of the kind of anti-social resentment that distinguishes so many modern criminals. Burglary or robbery with violence was simply a profession, usually embraced by people who drank too much and liked to keep more than one mistress. Many robbers swore to ‘get’ Vidocq when they came out; no one actually tried it, for their resentment evaporated quickly. During his early days as an informer, Vidocq met two hardened criminals he had known in jail, spent twenty-four hours drinking with them, and agreed to take part in a robbery which would include cutting the throats of two old men. He managed to get a note to M. Henry, and the police were waiting for them as they climbed over a garden wall. Someone fired; Vidocq dropped to the ground, pretending to be hit. And one of his fellow burglars had to be restrained from flinging himself in sorrow on Vidocq’s ‘body’. It is again a matter of the ‘xenophobic’ reaction – ‘them’ and ‘us’. W. S. Gilbert was perfectly correct when he pointed out that ‘when a felon’s not engaged in his employment’ he is as human and sentimental as anyone else. Vidocq often took the trouble to get to know men he had been instrumental in sending to the guillotine or life-imprisonment, performing small services – like taking messages to families – and formed genuinely warm and close relationships with them. He even instituted a custom of standing in the prison yard to watch the men being chained together before they were led off to the galleys. On the first occasion, they raged at him like wild beasts and dared him to come among them. Vidocq did precisely that – while prisoners looking out of barred windows urged the convicts to kill him. Yet no one touched him; they respected his bravery. Vidocq accepted various small commissions – final messages to wives and sweethearts – and parted from the convicts on the friendliest of terms. The socialists were obviously not entirely mistaken to argue that crime was largely a question of social conditions. The criminal with a ‘grudge against society’ had not yet made his appearance.