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the surgeon Paul Broca. Broca wished to create “a scientific society where one would have the right to draw all the philosophical consequences from one’s observations.” 2 When Louis-Adolphe was asked to join, he expressed concern that he was not knowledgeable in this field. “I wouldn’t be able to render it any service,” he said, “as I don’t know a word of anthropology.” Broca was unfazed. “Neither do I,” he responded. “All the more reason to learn it or, rather, to create it, because in truth, it doesn’t exist!” 3

Though the founders of the society had little knowledge of their subject, they would become the pioneers of the field in France. They saw anthropology as a way to express their progressive ideas about humanity and identify “all that is still present of the savage and barbaric in our modern civilizations.” 4 Among the things they wanted to do away with were the priesthood, militarism, the cult of authority, and the subjugation of women.

Louis-Adolphe was also a founder of the Society for Mutual Autopsy, whose members agreed to donate and dissect one another’s brains after death to promote the advancement of science. Fifteen years earlier, in 1861, Paul Broca had demonstrated through a postmortem that the left frontal lobe of the brain controlled speech. When it was damaged, speech was impaired in a symptom called “Broca’s aphasia.” 5 Broca further developed several instruments to measure and classify skulls, 6 the highest classification being “brachycephalic.” Conan Doyle used Broca’s terminology in his writing. Like Holmes, the archvillain Professor Moriarty is brachycephalic, and at their first meeting, he greets Holmes with the comment: “You have less frontal development than I should have expected.” 7 (Despite Broca’s proclaimed progressivism, women and people from non-European cultures were believed to have smaller and therefore inferior brains.)

It was into this intellectual community that Alphonse Bertillon was born on April 24, 1853. Not surprisingly, anthropometric techniques and measurements were part of Alphonse’s life almost from birth. When Alphonse was very young, his father had a biologist friend feel the heads of his two sons. The doctor proclaimed that both had “methodical and precise” minds and would be capable of scholarly work. When Alphonse was three, he and his brother imitated their elders by measuring with ribbons everything that they could get their hands on.

Both the Guillard and Bertillon families were experts in the new study of statistics, particularly as it related to human affairs. Louis-Adolphe was pleased when his elder son, Jacques, followed the family tradition and became a renowned statistician himself. Alphonse too seemed likely to head in that direction. He was particularly fond of quoting a sentence from his father’s works about the purpose of science being to find order within what seems to be chaos.

Unfortunately, Alphonse found that schools were not to his liking. At six, he was kicked out of his first one for lack of discipline. His home tutor also found Alphonse a problem, for the boy hid in a cupboard at lesson time, took the teacher’s glasses, and teased him so dreadfully that the tutor quit. Sent to the Rossat Institute in Charleville, a school for problem children, Alphonse was expelled from there as well, when he was eleven. In his teens he attended the lycée at Versailles and there he accidentally set fire to his desk while using a spirit lamp to make hot chocolate. When the teacher investigated the source of the smoke, Alphonse clamped down the lid of the desk, refusing to let the teacher open it, and for good measure hit him over the head with a Greek dictionary. He was sent home once more.

After France suffered its ignominious defeat at the hands of Prussia in 1870, eighteen-year-old Alphonse was called up for his required army service, possibly to the relief of his long-suffering father. The young man stood five feet ten inches tall — well above the average for his day — and his physical presence won him the respect of his fellow conscripts and the officers.