Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [84]
This latest feat of deduction brought Bertillon new acclaim. A caricature even appeared in L’Assiette au Beurre, a Paris newspaper, showing Bertillon peering through a magnifying glass at some prints left on the grimy wall of a public toilet. But in this instance, Bertillon was annoyed by the publicity. He failed to see that the case illustrated perfectly the value of fingerprints: left at the scene of a crime, they could identify the perpetrator as certainly as if he had left a calling card. Even so, as a result of the case, a legend (frequently repeated) grew that Bertillon had actually invented fingerprint identification.
For Bertillon, this case was a mere episode. He would not listen to his French colleagues, such as Lacassagne and Locard, who by now recognized the importance of fingerprinting. Indeed, Locard had been fascinated from the beginning by the new method and performed painful experiments on himself — burning his fingers with cold and hot irons — to see if his fingerprints would change, finding that they did not. But Bertillon treated the new discovery as a minor supplement to anthropometry. He never repudiated his statement “My measurements are surer than any fingerprint pattern,” 45 and by 1910, France was the only country in Europe that was not using fingerprinting as its primary identification system.
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With or without fingerprints, Bertillon was still successful in solving many crimes, and his accomplishments were recognized throughout Europe and the United States. Among his commendations was a medal from Queen Victoria for helping to identify bodies from the wreck of the ship Drummond Castle in 1896; though there were few comparative materials for Bertillon to work with, his ability to take precise measurements allowed some relatives to claim their dead.
The American muckraking writer Ida Tarbell came to interview Bertillon in 1894. “The prisoner who passes through his hands,” an admiring Tarbell wrote, “is subjected to measurements and descriptions that leave him forever ‘spotted.’ He may efface his tattooing, compress his chest, dye his hair, extract his teeth, scar his body, dissimulate his height. It is useless. The record against him is unfailing. He cannot pass the Bertillon archives without recognition; and, if he is at large, the relentless record may be made to follow him into every corner of the globe where there is a printing press, and every man who reads may become a detective furnished with information which will establish his identity. He is never again safe.” 46 Tarbell said that the Parisian apaches had invented a new phrase in their street argot: being arrested was referred to as un sourire pour le studio Bertillon, or “a smile for the Bertillon studio.” 47
In the same interview, Tarbell asked Bertillon whether his measuring system proved or disproved the theories of Cesare Lombroso and many other criminologists, who believed that certain physical characteristics were signs of criminality. He dismissed these theories, many of which were based on sheer racism. “No, I do not feel convinced that it is the lack of symmetry in the visage, or the size of the orbit, or the shape of the jaw, which make a man an evil-doer,” he answered, continuing:
A certain characteristic may incapacitate him for fulfilling his duties, thus thrusting him down in the struggle for life, and he becomes a criminal because he is down. Lombroso, for example, might say that since there is a spot on the eye of the majority of criminals, therefore the spot on the eye indicates a tendency to crime; not