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The war, however, dragged on for four years, ultimately resulting in the deaths of eight and a half million soldiers and another twenty million wounded. An uncounted number of civilians died from disease, starvation, and other war-related causes. France alone lost one and a half million men in battle and its aftermath. The war dwarfed any crime, indeed any previous war. It destroyed a generation of young men and brought to an end the optimistic era known in France as “La Belle Époque.”

Among the technological advancements that made this war so terrible was the airplane. Used at first to scout enemy forces, planes then began to carry bombs. (Initially, bombs were merely dropped by pilots from open cockpits.) To counter attacks and observation from the air, military planners started to conceal potential targets with cloth. Later, special paint designs, called camouflage, were used. Naval warfare was affected by the widespread use of submarines that were equipped with periscopes to spot their targets. Ships were painted with geometric patterns in varying colors to create confusion about their size and direction of travel. The French officer credited with inventing camouflage, Guirand de Scevola, explained his inspiration: “In order to totally deform objects, I employed the means Cubists used to represent them.” 3

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The year 1914 also saw France lose its most prominent criminologist. For more than a year, Alphonse Bertillon had suffered from pernicious anemia, which his doctors told him would be fatal. He felt a chronic chill and stayed in a single room where he kept a stove burning day and night. Fatigue dogged him, and his vision began to fail.

Bertillon worried continually that his identification system would die with him. The news that countries around the world were replacing bertillonage with fingerprinting gnawed at his spirit and pride. The Argentine criminologist Juan Vucetich, who was the leading exponent of fingerprinting, had cruelly declared, “I can assure you that in all the years during which we applied the anthropometric system, in spite of all our care, we were unable to prove the identity of a single person by measurements.” 4 Later, when Vucetich came to Paris and tried to visit Bertillon, Bertillon kept him waiting for hours in the anteroom of his office, only to open the door, ignore Vucetich’s outstretched hand, and declare, “Sir, you have tried to do me a great deal of harm.” 5 He then slammed the door, and that was all Vucetich saw of Bertillon.

Aware that Bertillon was dying, the French government wished to honor his achievements. He had already received the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor for his work, but he desired the rosette of the Legion, which signified a higher distinction. The government offered the rosette on one condition: Bertillon had to acknowledge his error regarding the handwriting analysis of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, now reinstated as an officer. Bertillon is said to have shouted from the bed where he spent his final days: “No! Never! Never!” 6

Bertillon died on February 13, 1914. In his will he ordered that his brain be donated to the Laboratory of Anthropology. Afterward, his wife burned all the letters that he had exchanged with the mysterious Swedish woman with whom he had carried on a love affair years before. In doing so, she ensured that her husband, who had been known for his abhorrence of publicity, would retain his privacy even in death.

Though bertillonage was abandoned soon afterward, it has been revived in a different form today. Computer programs have been devised to analyze faces and to compare them with those of known criminals. Called biometrics, this system was used in Massachusetts in 2006 to scan some nine million driver’s license photographs to locate a man wanted on rape charges.

Biometrics relies on the distinctive characteristics of what are called the nodal points of faces. These include the distance between the eyes, the width of the nose, the depth of the eye sockets, chin and jawline patterns—much the same as the system