Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [34]
He returned to Paris, where he lived with his wife in the Marais section. At night he frequented the gaming dens, saloons, and brothels in the most dangerous sections of the city. He listened to the schemes and plots being hatched — sometimes being invited to take part in them — and then reported them to his superiors at the prefecture. “The rogues and thieves whom I daily met there firmly believed me to be one of themselves,” he wrote. 9 He did not see himself as a traitor, because he did not believe that he was a criminal — only a person who had taken up crime out of necessity. He further claimed that he never turned in anyone for stealing bread to feed himself or his family.
All the while, Vidocq’s ability to disguise himself continued to improve. His biographer Joseph Geringer wrote, “He played pirates with black-patched eyes, runaway convicts under a month’s chin growth, aged thieves behind gray side whiskers, pickpockets with a limp and a cane and a ragged frock, even persons displaced from their homeland — a scar-faced German swordsman wanted by the Berlin police for killing two men in a duel, the dark Sicilian Gypsy who had killed a wife in Castelvetrano, the British barrister, complete with spectacles, wanted for cutting the throat of a rival attorney in London. With dialect and colloquialism to accompany each caricature, Vidocq carried every animation with aplomb.” 10 He was so adept at disguise that he was once approached to make a hit on himself.
In real life, changing one’s looks and name to alter one’s history, even when practiced by lesser men than Vidocq, was a perennial problem for police forces. In France, galley “slaves” — those who had been sentenced to forced labor — were branded to prevent them from escaping, 11 a practice that was banned in 1832. Afterward, the police had no real way of knowing whether a suspect was a recidivist, or career criminal, because it was nearly impossible to determine if he had ever been arrested before. Vidocq himself, adept at shifting personae, began to tackle that problem.
ii
The population of Paris grew to more than one million people between 1800 and 1850, making it the largest city on the mainland of Europe. Vidocq recognized that the sheer size of the metropolis caused difficulty for the police, who were poorly organized. At the time, the Prefecture of Paris, still led by the Baron de Pasquier, was composed of the First Division, or Administrative Branch, and the Second Division, or Special Investigative Branch, under “Papa” Henry. The city was divided into several geographic sectors, each under the jurisdiction of a commissaire with a small staff. The commissaires worked only within their own domains, so criminals who ranged freely over the whole city were hard to track down. Vidocq recognized in this confusion a possible job for himself. He suggested that a small group of crime fighters be formed to operate throughout Paris, to keep the criminal and ex-convict population under surveillance. His group could stop crimes before they occurred, a novel idea for the time.
Henry and de Pasquier had been impressed by Vidocq’s earlier services and agreed to give him four assistants; his staff would grow over time to twenty-eight. They were paid from secret funds and not publicly acknowledged. In the autumn of 1812, Vidocq and his men were formalized as the plainclothes bureau. Thus began the Sûreté, or security police, which was eventually to become the official investigative branch of the French judiciary.
Vidocq chose ex-criminals and ex-cons for his agents, believing they were the only ones with the street smarts and toughness to do the job he had in mind. Even at this time, Vidocq had it in his mind that, like him, these ex-offenders could become useful members of society. He proudly recalled: “I preferred men whose record had given them a little celebrity.