He made it, in fact, in 1834, the year after Vidocq’s retirement, in the person of Pierre Francois Lacenaire. In December of that year, an old woman and her son were found murdered in their room in Paris, stabbed and hatcheted. A few weeks later, there was an attempt to murder a bank messenger who had been summoned to a room to collect money from a ‘M. Mahossier’. Although badly wounded, he managed to shout, and his two assailants fled. He was able to describe ‘Mahossier’, and Vidocq’s successor Canler, who was placed in charge of the case, discovered that Mahossier was really a crook named Lacenaire, who used many aliases. Two of his accomplices were arrested and confessed. Finally, Lacenaire himself was arrested as he tried to negotiate a forged bill; infuriated that his companions had betrayed him, he also made a full confession – to the murder of the old woman and her son, as well as the attempt on the bank messenger. In prison, he wrote his Memoirs, and became something of a celebrity. For Lacenaire was far more educated, and far more intelligent, than the average criminal. He wrote poetry, studied anarchist literature, and regarded himself as a rebellious outcast of society.
Lacenaire’s Memoirs tell a story that is familiar today, but was in those days unique: the oversensitive child who was jealous of the attention his parents gave to his elder brother, and who developed an immense capacity for resentment and self-pity. ‘A victim of injustice since infancy, I had… created a view of life quite different from other men’s.’ He stole to gain attention, and found that it only made his parents furious. After two boring years in a bank he came to Paris and tried to live by his pen, found this impossible and joined the army, then grew bored and deserted. He turned his talent to forging bills of exchange. In Italy, he discovered that one of his fellow hotel guests had told the police that Lacenaire was probably a fugitive from justice; Lacenaire invited the man out for a walk in the woods, ordered him to fight a duel, and then, when the man refused, shot him through the head. Another spell in the army ended in disgrace. And when he began to feel weary and desperate, his self-pity suggested that someone must be to blame, and that ‘the someone’ was Society. ‘I determined there and then to be the scourge of Society…’ He was reasoning in the same manner as Carl Panzram, but half a century before Panzram’s birth. Like Panzram, he was convinced that other people deserved the blame. ‘Some people will say to me “What are you complaining about?… Forger in France, murderer in Italy, thief in Paris, meditating sinister projects against Society – had you a right to its charity?” Yes, because I thought my father’s fortune would enable me to pay it all back. Murderer in Italy? Yes, because I had been betrayed in a cowardly fashion… Meditating sinister projects against Society? Yes, because in 1829 it refused me not a place in its ranks – which I had done nothing to win – but bread, to which the whole world has a right, good and bad alike…’ But within a few pages he is admitting that when he has money in his pockets, he has to squander it as soon as possible. It is ‘magical thinking’. His misfortunes are always ‘no fault of his own’: ‘But when I found myself penniless, through no fault of my own, when… I found myself rejected and disdained on every side… then hatred followed contempt, deep, gnawing hatred, in which I eventually included the whole of humankind.’ Rousseau convinced him that the rich were to blame. So he went and killed a poor old woman and her homosexual son, a petty moneylender… What he really meant was that self-pity led him to make the decision to abandon all restraints, to be ‘out of control’, to allow himself to sink to the level of a beast of prey, while assuring himself that it was not really his fault. In prison, he received the kind of attention he had always craved, and he revelled in it. At this point, he must have recognised that he had made the wrong decision: that it would have been worth the effort of self-discipline to achieve the fame he had always wanted. Like Vidocq, he would have been glad of a second chance. But it was too late, and he did the next best thing: went to the guillotine with cool bravado.
One of the most interesting comments in Lacenaire’s Memoirs occurs in a passage where he is discussing virtue. ‘I know only one virtue, which is worth all the rest: it is Sensibility.’ By sensibility he meant what we would call sensitiveness, the ability to feel deeply, like Young Werther and the hero of The New Héloise, the ability to go into ecstasies and write poetry.
The concept enables us to grasp what was happening to society, and why the nature of crime was changing steadily. The uneducated poor might still be living under much the same conditions as the poor of Defoe’s day. But hundreds of thousands of men like Lacenaire were absorbing cheap fiction and living inside their own heads rather than in the material world. Their ability to enter the world of imagination made them more sensitive than the unlettered poor. But it also subjected them to fits of gloom and discouragement, to ‘nervous prostration’, to fits of self-pity. In short, it turned them into victims of the ‘emotional body’ – of their own feelings. So instead of reacting to stress with cheerful pragmatism, they conjured up non-existent problems. ‘I lived ten years in an hour,’ says Lacenaire, describing one of his own fits of despair. ‘I wanted to kill myself… Henceforth, my life was a long drawn-out suicide…’ In America, at the same time, a young army cadet who bore a certain physical resemblance to Lacenaire was behaving in much the same way; he was writing poetry, neglecting his duty, drinking heavily, alienating friends and relatives. Edgar Allan Poe was nine years younger than Lacenaire, and he turned to literature rather than crime. But a comparison of their two lives shows startling similarities, and makes us aware that they were extreme examples of a type that was becoming increasingly common. The majority of them lacked the talent of Lacenaire and Poe; but novels had filled them with the vague feeling that they deserved more out of life than they were likely to get. The writings of the socialists seemed to justify this feeling; they diffused the vague idea that the majority were underprivileged because a small minority had seized all the riches of society for themselves. This notion convinced Lacenaire that he should be stabbing people in the back rather than making any effort, and that anybody who had achieved anything through effort must be a crook who deserved to be murdered and robbed. So although socialism began as a doctrine of compassion and concern, it soon degenerated into a ‘magical’ justification of criminality. Proudhon and Marx dreamed of a society of strong and self-sufficient individuals; in fact, they did more than all the politicians to create a society of self-pitying egoists.
American society had always believed in the importance of individual enterprise; it is therefore no surprise that American crime began to exhibit this individualistic tendency long before crime in Europe. In 1776, a beautiful eighteen-year-old girl, Bathsheba Ruggles, was married to Joshua Spooner, a wealthy landowner who was many years her senior – the marriage having been arranged by her father, General Timothy Ruggles. Spooner owned a great deal of Massachusetts. Bathsheba soon began having affairs with local men. In 1776, Bathsheba, like her father, was an ardent supporter of King George, while her husband favoured secession. One day, an emaciated young soldier passed the front door, and Bathsheba invited him in for a meal. Sixteen-year-old Ezra Ross had soon joined the list of her lovers. In February, 1778, Bathsheba offered a meal to two British soldiers who had escaped from an American prison camp. She then set about persuading Ross and the two guests to murder her husband. On 1 March 1778, they waited for him as he returned from a tavern, strangled him and threw his body down a well. The following morning, Bathsheba gave a very passable imitation of an anxious wife; a search party found Spooner’s body, which had been stripped of most of its clothes. The three killers had stopped in a tavern in the nearby town of Worcester, where they spent some of the money Bathsheba had given them and showed off a watch that had been taken from Spooner. They were arrested, and immediately confessed. Sentenced to death with the others, Bathsheba tried to delay the sentence by insisting that she was pregnant, but was disbelieved. After all four had been hanged on the same scaffold, she was dissected, and found to be five months pregnant.