Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [81]
The officers who were pressing for Dreyfus’s conviction, however, portrayed Bertillon’s judgment as a scientific certainty. Bertillon himself, swept along by the flattery, declared, “The proof is there and is irrefutable. From the very first day, you knew my opinion. It is now absolute, complete, and admitting of no reservation.” 38 He was never to soften that self-confident assertion, despite later evidence that overwhelmingly contradicted it.
Several more highly publicized trials marked the course of the affair, Bertillon testifying at all of them. At each, he violated the very principle that he tried to instill in those who adopted his system: to see as truly and objectively as possible. Abandoning that only subjected him to more ridicule. At the 1898 trial at which Émile Zola was tried for libel after he accused the minister of war of framing Dreyfus, Bertillon’s performance had drawn hoots of laughter from Zola’s supporters. There too, he brought as part of his evidence diagrams and charts and enlarged photographs to defend his system, but they only confused everyone who saw them.
An observer at the trial, an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote in his journal his impressions of the participants: “I nearly forgot the handwriting experts, absurd creatures incapable of agreeing on the most elementary deductions, flinging their extraordinary theories in one another’s faces and running down and abusing one another like Molière’s doctors. But one of them deserves special mention — Bertillon, who is a madman, a maniac, armed with the crafty, obstinate, and powerful dialectic that is the characteristic of interpretative psychosis.” 39 Zola’s defense lawyers mocked Bertillon so cruelly that he became tongue-tied. The judge rescued him by declaring, “Let us say that the witness does not want to speak.” 40
At Dreyfus’s second court-martial, Bertillon once again stunned objective observers with his labyrinthine presentations. When the defense attorney cross-examined him, he punctured Bertillon’s self-assurance, drawing laughter from the spectators. An English reporter described the scene: “Now and again M. Bertillon’s voice rose in hateful shrieks. There were interludes when he clenched his fist and struck the bar, swearing that Dreyfus was the traitor. The voice rang out with passion and excitement. You beheld in him the man vain unto madness with confidence in his atrocious phantasies. He was at last taking his revenge for all the insults of those who had called him a fit subject for an asylum of the insane.” 41
In April 1904, at the Cour de Cassation, three of France’s most eminent scientists reviewed Bertillon’s work. Using the cutting-edge scientific instruments of the time, the trio took a fresh look at the bordereau. They tested Bertillon’s argument that the writing had to have come from a person using the type of grid used in drawing military maps and utilized a macro-micromètre, developed for astronomy and the mapping of the skies, to check the handwriting and measure the distances between and within the letters. Their instruments were far more exact and technologically advanced than those of Bertillon, and in a sense, he was outmeasured. Stating their conclusions based on statistical probability, they demolished Bertillon’s argument and concluded that Bertillon’s work was devoid of any scientific value.
The scientists’ testimony was crucial in clearing Dreyfus of all charges. Perhaps it was surprising, then, that Bertillon was not correspondingly disgraced and discredited, like some of the military officers who had concocted false evidence against Dreyfus. In fact, Bertillon kept his job, and his prestige does not seem to have declined appreciably.
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As impressive as the Bertillon identification system was, it had two flaws. First,