# Eugène François Vidocq: The Convict Who Ran the Sûreté

- Link: https://thedarksideofhumanity.com/eugene-francois-vidocq/
- Published: 2026-10-29T13:00:53-04:00
- Author: Mandi Martyr

Content warning: This case file describes prison conditions, chain gangs of convicts, duels, a public execution, assaults and the police informing system in early nineteenth century France. It names a man whose execution Vidocq witnessed and the two complainants in an 1843 prosecution that ended in acquittal. It contains no images of violence.TDSH Case File · Arras, Brest, Toulon and Paris · 1775 to 1857Eugène François Vidocq: The Convict Who Ran the SûretéConvicted 1796Chief of the SûretéAcquitted on appeal 1843Convicted: forgery, Douai, 1796DouaiBrest and ToulonParisA forger’s sentence at Douai in 1796, escapes from the bagnes at Brest and Toulon, then twenty years as the informer and chief of the Paris Brigade de Sûreté. This case file separates what the record shows about Eugène François Vidocq from what he and his ghostwriters claimed in the Mémoires.Legal status: Eugène François Vidocq was convicted on December 27, 1796, by the criminal court at Douai, together with César Herbaux, of forgery of public documents (« faux en écritures publiques et authentiques ») and sentenced to eight years of hard labour. He always denied taking part in the forgery. He escaped from the bagnes (convict prisons) at Brest and Toulon, was later pardoned by royal letters (in 1817 according to English Wikipedia, in 1818 according to French Wikipedia and to Vidocq’s own preface), and led the Paris police’s Brigade de Sûreté. In 1837 he was charged with obtaining money by deception, corrupting officials and impersonating a public function; English Wikipedia says the charges were dismissed in February 1838, French Wikipedia that he was acquitted after a year in Sainte-Pélagie prison. In May 1843 a Paris correctional court convicted him over an arbitrary arrest and a swindle and sentenced him to five years; on July 22, 1843, the appeal court acquitted him. A fraud charge in 1849 was dropped. He died in Paris on May 11, 1857. Episodes known only from his partly ghostwritten Mémoires are attributed to him below. Status checked against the saved sources on October 23, 2026.He was a thief who became a policeman, a convict who ran the detective branch of the Paris prefecture, and an escaper from two of France’s convict prisons. Before he died in 1857 Eugène François Vidocq had also founded what historians call a prototype of the private detective agency, and Balzac had turned him into Vautrin.He also told his own story, in four volumes published in 1828 and 1829, and that is the problem every account of him faces. The Mémoires de Vidocq made him famous, but they were reworked by hired writers, and Vidocq himself complained in their preface that the first volume had been rewritten without him. The historian Jean Tulard, writing for the French state’s 2007 book of national commemorations, called the stories “probablement très arrangés,” probably heavily arranged, and added a second warning: “on ne sait rien de sûr,” nothing is known for certain, because the archives of the Paris Préfecture de police burned in 1871.This case file follows the record where there is one: court judgments, registers, the prefects who employed him and the work of French police historians. Stories that rest only on the Mémoires are attributed to Vidocq, and conflicts between sources are stated and flagged.Sources: Wikipedia (French and English); Mémoires, tome 1, preface (PG 38057); Criminocorpus record 117670 (search record only); Tulard, FranceArchives (2007); Kalifa via French Wikipedia; Commons file record.01A baker’s son from ArrasExhibitPortrait of Eugène Vidocq (1775 to 1857), adventurer and head of the police de sûreté, lithograph by Achille Devéria, about 1828, printed by Benard & Frey. The whole print is shown, including the brown-ink inscription below the image certifying that the portrait matches all copies of the edition; it ends with the number 2585 and the name “Vidocq.” Musée Carnavalet, G.12180.Image: Achille Devéria / Paris Musées, Musée Carnavalet, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (CC0).Vidocq was born in Arras, in the province of Artois in northern France, in July 1775. The date itself is the first of the disagreements. The Mémoires give July 23. French Wikipedia, citing parish and family research, gives July 24, explaining in a note that he was born during the night of the 23rd to the 24th, at two in the morning. Tulard gives the 24th. English Wikipedia gives the night of July 23 to 24.The opening page of the Mémoires sets the tone for everything that follows. “Je suis né à Arras,” it begins, and goes on (translated here): “I came into the world on July 23, 1775, in a house next to the one where, sixteen years earlier, Robespierre had been born. It was night: the rain was falling in torrents.” The detail about Robespierre is Vidocq’s claim, and the storm reads like literature, which by then it partly was.His father was a baker. Tulard calls him a “maître boulanger,” a master baker; French Wikipedia adds that he was also a grain merchant and that the family belonged to the petite bourgeoisie, living on the rue du Miroir-de-Venise in the parish of Saint-Géry. The two Wikipedia articles disagree on his parents’ given names and on the street’s modern name, so those details are left out and flagged.Almost everything about his boyhood comes from the Mémoires. English Wikipedia says so directly: little is known about his childhood, and most of it “is based on his ghost-written autobiography and a few documents in French archives.” At thirteen, Vidocq claimed, he stole his parents’ silver, and his father arranged for him to spend some days in the town’s lock-up for boys, the Baudets, to teach him a lesson. Later he stole a larger sum from the bakery’s takings and ran away to Ostend, meaning to sail for the Americas. He said he was robbed there, worked for travelling showmen and a pedlar, and came home to be forgiven. The Wikipedia articles put him at fourteen or sixteen at the time.Tulard, for his part, reduces the whole of this period to two questions: did he work for an acrobat? Was he a deserter? What is certain, he writes, is that Vidocq was condemned to the bagne and never stopped trying to get out of it.Sources: Mémoires, tome 1 (PG 38057); Tulard (2007); Wikipedia (French and English).02Soldier, duellist, deserterOn March 10, 1791, according to English Wikipedia, Vidocq enlisted in the Bourbon Regiment. Both Wikipedia articles place him at the Battle of Valmy in September 1792 and at Jemappes in November of that year, the early victories of the revolutionary armies against Austria and Prussia.The duels are where the record thins out. “According to Vidocq,” English Wikipedia says, he challenged fifteen men to duels in six months and killed two. No court or regimental record of those deaths appears in the saved sources, and the claim is treated here as his. The same account says he struck a sergeant major who refused a duel, deserted for fear of the consequences, and re-enlisted in the 11th Chasseurs under a concealed history. French Wikipedia gives a precise date for the end of his military career: he was dismissed from the 11th regiment of chasseurs à cheval on May 28, 1793, after about ten duels.Back in Arras, the story continues, he was jailed again for brawling over women. In 1794 he married a woman from Arras after she told him she was pregnant; the Wikipedia articles agree the marriage was unhappy, and English Wikipedia says the couple divorced in 1805. French Wikipedia adds that he stole her savings when he left. Her name is not used here.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French). Duels as claimed by Vidocq.03The flying army and the prison at LilleFrench Wikipedia describes a life of theft and swindling between Paris and the north, and says that in 1795 he joined the “armée roulante,” the rolling or flying army. English Wikipedia explains the term: bands of men who passed themselves off as officers, forging their routes, ranks and uniforms, without commissions or regiments, and keeping well away from the fighting. Vidocq, under the alias Rousseau, is said to have started as a lieutenant of chasseurs and promoted himself to captain of hussars.In September 1795, English Wikipedia says, he was sentenced to three months in the Tour Saint-Pierre prison in Lille for beating a woman he had been involved with and the soldier she had left him for. In that prison he met the men in the forgery case that would convict him.The account of the next months, again, is his. In English Wikipedia’s summary, a fellow prisoner named Boitel, serving six years for theft, was suddenly freed on a pardon that turned out the next day to be forged. Vidocq claimed that two other inmates, Grouard and Herbaux, had borrowed his cell, which as a soldier he had to himself, to write something he knew nothing about. Both men said instead that he had helped make the false document and that the scheme was his idea. He escaped several times while awaiting trial, he said, and was recaptured each time. The same account says he was once accused of stabbing a woman who had helped him, and that the accusation was dropped when she said the wounds were self-inflicted; no court document for it was found, and it is flagged.Sources: Wikipedia (French and English); the English article draws on the Mémoires.04Convicted at DouaiThe forgery case came to trial after a long delay. On December 27, 1796, the criminal court at Douai found Vidocq and César Herbaux guilty. French Wikipedia records the charge as « faux en écritures publiques et authentiques », forgery of public and authentic documents, and the sentence as eight years of hard labour, the travaux forcés served in the naval bagnes.Vidocq maintained for the rest of his life that the conviction was unjust. When he petitioned for a job with the police years later, by his own account, he set out “la cause de ma condamnation,” the reason for his conviction, alongside the regularity of his conduct whenever he had been free. The Mémoires also describe a decision he made after the verdict: worn out by the treatment in the prison at Douai, he did not appeal, because an appeal would have kept him there for months, and he had learned that the convicts were about to be sent to Bicêtre and on to the bagne at Brest. “It is unnecessary to say,” the English translation of the Mémoires has him explain, “that I was relying on escaping en route.”Sources: Wikipedia (French and English); Mémoires, tome 2 (PG 38058); Memoirs of Vidocq, page 54, via English Wikipedia.05Bicêtre and the chainExhibit“Vidocq pursued by gendarmes,” engraving by George Cruikshank, from Memoirs of Vidocq (New Orleans: J.C. Morgan & Co., 1859), page 182.Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Before a convict reached the bagne, he waited at Bicêtre, the great prison and hospice south of Paris, for the departure of the “chaîne,” the column of prisoners chained together for the march to the coast. French Wikipedia quotes the description that the Bicêtre register entered for him on May 20, 1797: “François Vidocq, marchand d’indienne,” a dealer in printed cotton, married, living at the time of his arrest in Lille, native of Arras, five feet six inches tall in the old French measure, with blond hair and eyebrows, grey eyes, a long aquiline nose, a crooked mouth, a scar on the right side of his upper lip and pierced ears. The same register gives his age as 26, which does not fit a man born in 1775.At Bicêtre, both Wikipedia articles say, a fellow inmate taught him savate, the French art of fighting with the feet. English Wikipedia records a failed escape attempt on October 3, 1797, which earned him eight days in a dungeon. French Wikipedia says the march to Brest took twenty-four days and that he tried to slip away in the forest of Compiègne on the way.Sources: Bicêtre register via French Wikipedia (note 15); English Wikipedia; Commons file record.06Escape from BrestBrest was the naval port at the western tip of Brittany, and its bagne put convicts to work in the arsenal. The two main secondary accounts date Vidocq’s escape differently.French Wikipedia says the chain reached Brest on 24 nivôse an VI of the revolutionary calendar, January 13, 1798. At the hospital of Pontanézen, at the entrance to the town, where the convicts’ irons were changed, he tried to jump the wall and sprained both ankles. Eight days after his arrival, the same account says, he got hold of sailor’s clothes, hid them in the arsenal where he worked, changed into them and walked out of Brest unchallenged. English Wikipedia instead has him sent to Brest on November 21, 1797, and escaping, dressed as a sailor, on February 28, 1798.The weeks after the escape come from the Mémoires. Arrested for lack of papers, he gave the name Auguste Duval. “Je me nomme Duval,” he has himself say in the first volume. While the authorities checked, he was placed in a prison hospital, from which, English Wikipedia says, he escaped in a nun’s habit. He then worked as a cattle drover, passing through Paris, Arras and Brussels, and ended up on a privateer out of the Dutch ports before he was arrested again, taken to Douai and identified. These episodes have no independent corroboration in the saved sources and are flagged as his.The police prefect Pasquier, who later authorized his release from Bicêtre, wrote in his own memoirs that Vidocq had been held “à la suite de deux ou trois évasions des bagnes de Brest et de Toulon,” after two or three escapes from the bagnes of Brest and Toulon. It is the strongest contemporary evidence in this file that the escapes happened.Sources: Wikipedia (French and English); Mémoires, tome 1 (PG 38057); Pasquier via Tulard (2007).07Toulon and ten years on the runExhibit“Vidocq escaping by means of the Fosse Family,” engraving by George Cruikshank, frontispiece of Memoirs of Vidocq (New Orleans: J.C. Morgan & Co., 1859), illustrating page 330.Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Identified at Douai, Vidocq was sent this time to the bagne at Toulon, on the Mediterranean. English Wikipedia gives his arrival as August 29, 1799, and both Wikipedia articles date his escape to March 6, 1800. English Wikipedia says a prostitute helped him; French Wikipedia says only that the escape gave him a respect and notoriety without equal in the underworld.The next nine years are again known mostly from his own account. He went back to Arras in 1800 and hid in his mother’s house for nearly six months before he was recognized. His father had died in 1799. Under an assumed identity he moved to Rouen in 1802 and built up a business, English Wikipedia says, before his past caught up with him and he was arrested and taken north.The same account reports that he learned he had been sentenced to death in absentia, appealed, and spent five months waiting for a retrial, and that on November 28, 1805, left alone for a moment, he jumped from a window into the river Scarpe and got away. No judgment imposing a death sentence appears among the saved sources, and that claim is flagged.One event from these years has a different weight. In Paris, English Wikipedia says, he witnessed the execution of César Herbaux, his co-defendant in the Douai forgery case. English Wikipedia describes the execution as the event that started Vidocq thinking about a different life. Even then, by his account, it was not easy to change: people from his prison years kept recognizing him, his former wife found him and demanded money, and old fellow convicts pressed him into fencing stolen goods.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French), the English largely from the Mémoires; Commons file record.08The informer of Bicêtre and La ForceExhibit“Vidocq and the old gallery guard,” engraving by George Cruikshank, from Memoirs of Vidocq (New Orleans: J.C. Morgan & Co., 1859), page 147.Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.On July 1, 1809, a few days before his 34th birthday, Vidocq was arrested again in Paris. This time he went to the police himself. In the Mémoires he describes calling on “M. Henry, chef de la division de sûreté à la préfecture de police,” the head of the security division, and offering information “sur un grand nombre de forçats évadés, dont je connaissais la retraite et les projets,” on a great number of escaped convicts whose hiding places and plans he knew, in exchange for being allowed to stay in Paris. Henry, he wrote, received him kindly but would promise nothing.Jean Henry is a figure the record does support. Tulard describes him as head of the second division of the Préfecture, which handled criminal affairs and kept the central register of descriptions of people charged with serious offences. The criminal underworld, Tulard says, called him “l’ange malin,” the cunning angel, and it had seemed effective to him to hire former convicts to fight thieves, counterfeiters and pickpockets.After the 1809 arrest, Vidocq wrote to Henry again offering his services, he said, on the single condition that he not be sent back to the bagne, and was prepared to serve out his time in any prison. The offer was accepted. According to English Wikipedia he was placed in Bicêtre on July 20, 1809, as a “mouchard,” an informer among the prisoners, and moved to La Force prison on October 28. He passed what he learned about false identities and unsolved crimes to the police.The prefect of police, Pasquier, confirmed the arrangement in his own memoirs, in the passage Tulard quotes: Vidocq had already rendered the police “d’assez importants services” in Bicêtre, fairly important services, based on the contacts that imprisoned thieves always manage to keep with those outside. Henry had judged that if Vidocq were freed he could help make “précieuses découvertes” in Paris, “et il ne s’était pas trompé,” and he was not wrong.After twenty-one months of spying, Vidocq was released on March 25, 1811, on Henry’s recommendation. English Wikipedia says the release was staged as an escape so the other prisoners would not suspect him. He was free only on the police’s tolerance.Sources: English Wikipedia; Mémoires, tome 2 (PG 38058); Tulard (2007), quoting Pasquier; French Wikipedia; Commons file record.09The Brigade de SûretéExhibitEugène François Vidocq, engraved portrait attributed to Marie Gabrielle Coignet, dated on its Commons record to about 1830 to 1840.Image: Marie Gabrielle Coignet, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Tulard puts it plainly: in 1811 a special brigade was created, recruited only among more or less repentant convicts. Vidocq ran it, was paid out of the secret funds, and set up on the rue Sainte-Anne. French Wikipedia says the police prefect Pasquier placed him at its head unofficially in 1811, and that the appointment became official only after his pardon.English Wikipedia gives a slightly different sequence: Vidocq informally organized a plainclothes unit at the end of 1811, and in October 1812 the experiment was officially made a security police unit under the Prefecture, with Vidocq as its chief. It adds that on December 17, 1813, Napoleon signed a decree making the brigade a state security police called the Sûreté Nationale. That claim is not in Tulard or either French article and is not repeated here as fact. The museum record for the Devéria portrait puts the start of his command in 1809. The variants are flagged.The brigade was small. English Wikipedia gives its strength as eight men at first, then twelve, then twenty in 1823 and twenty-eight in 1824, with eight more people working secretly in exchange for licences to run gambling houses. Vidocq himself, in a passage of the Mémoires quoted by English Wikipedia, described the load on so small a force: watching more than twelve hundred released convicts, executing four to five hundred warrants a year, making nightly rounds and covering “the theatres, the boulevards, the barriers, and all other public places, the haunts of thieves and pickpockets.”The idea that thieves were best caught by thieves was the brigade’s founding principle and its permanent scandal. Pasquier, who approved Vidocq’s release, wrote later that the public confidence shown “à un homme condamné,” to a convicted man, had had “un très mauvais effet” and had contributed on several occasions “à déconsidérer la police,” to bringing the police into disrepute. In 1826, before the Mémoires appeared, Louis Guyon’s Biographie des commissaires de police et des officiers de paix de la ville de Paris had already called the brigade chief’s public existence « une monstruosité qui pèse énormément sur la police », a monstrosity weighing heavily on the police, according to a 2018 article on RetroNews, the press site of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.The historian Jean-Marc Berlière, in a 1993 essay on real and fictional police, “Police réelle et police fictive,” gave the belief a name: the “syndrome de Vidocq,” the idea, widespread throughout the century, that to hunt criminals one has to be or to have been one. He also counted among the “plaies héritées de Vidocq,” the wounds inherited from Vidocq, “l’indication,” informing, and the “condé” that served the policeman as the currency to obtain it.Sources: Tulard (2007); Wikipedia (French and English), including Service de la Sûreté; Paris Musées record on Commons; Cau, RetroNews (2018); Berlière, Romantisme (1993).10Methods, numbers and the legendExhibit“Vidocq arresting Pons,” engraving by George Cruikshank, half title of Memoirs of Vidocq (New Orleans: J.C. Morgan & Co., 1859), illustrating page 569.Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.English Wikipedia says that in 1817 Vidocq was involved in 811 arrests, including fifteen assassins and thirty-eight receivers of stolen goods. French Wikipedia says his men claimed three times as many captures as the regular police between 1811 and 1827, and that Vidocq would eventually claim more than 16,000 arrests over his career. The 16,000 figure rests on a 2013 guidebook quoted in a French Wikipedia note; it is his claim, not a count.Disguise was central to the method. French Wikipedia calls him an excellent “physionomiste,” able to recognize a face he had seen once, even made up, and says he excelled at disguise himself. Berlière, the historian, describes disguise as a technique “abondamment utilisée par Vidocq,” abundantly used by him, drawing on the age-old practices of criminals themselves. The Mémoires add his own stories of passing as a beggar and even faking his death.Several inventions credited to him are harder to pin down. English Wikipedia says he kept index cards on every arrested person, with descriptions, aliases, previous convictions and methods, and that this card system lasted until Alphonse Bertillon’s reforms. It credits him with commissioning a tamper-proof paper, for which he filed a patent, and an indelible ink, and repeats a story attributed to Alexandre Dumas of an 1822 murder solved by comparing a bullet to a pair of pistols. These accounts come through biographers, not original documents. The paper is the best attested: the title page of the first volume of the Mémoires describes him as “propriétaire et fabricant de papier, à Saint-Mandé.” The ballistics and card-index claims are flagged.Rumours that he staged crimes in order to solve them followed him throughout his career. French Wikipedia says that people he arrested accused him of setting up the jobs and then arresting the participants to prove his worth, and that the courts did not accept the allegations. The Mémoires carry an epigraph that reads, in hindsight, like an answer to those charges: “En police, il vaut mieux ne pas faire d’affaire que d’en créer,” in police work it is better to make no case at all than to create one.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French); Berlière (1993); Mémoires, tome 1 (PG 38057); Commons file record.11A pardon and a resignationFor years the head of the brigade remained, legally, an escaped convict. English Wikipedia says the prison director at Douai repeatedly asked for him back and that his superiors ignored the requests, until the prefect, Count Jules Anglès, backed a petition from Vidocq and obtained a royal pardon from Louis XVIII. English Wikipedia dates the pardon to March 26, 1817. French Wikipedia dates the royal letters of pardon to 1818, restoring his civil rights. Vidocq’s own preface to the Mémoires supports 1818: in July 1828, he wrote, he went to Douai to have ratified “des lettres de grâces qui m’avaient été accordées en 1818.” Both years are given here; the conflict is flagged.English Wikipedia describes a new prefect, Guy Delavau, who set great store by religious observance, and then the departure of Henry, his protector. That date is disputed. Tulard writes that Henry retired in 1822 and that Vidocq, “si l’on en croit les Mémoires de Canler,” if one believes the memoirs of the police officer Louis Canler, had to follow him. Yet the resignation letter quoted by English Wikipedia is dated June 20, 1827, and English and French Wikipedia agree that he left that year.The letter, addressed to Henry’s eventual successor Marc Duplessis, is the most direct record of his voice. “Depuis dix-huit ans, je sers la police avec distinction,” it begins: for eighteen years I have served the police with distinction, and never received a single reproach from your predecessors. Since Duplessis’s appointment, it goes on, this was the second time he had complained about Vidocq’s agents. “Suis-je le maître de les contenir hors du bureau? Non.” Am I master of them outside the office? No. To spare them both the trouble of further complaints, he asked Duplessis to accept his resignation.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French); Mémoires, tome 1, preface (PG 38057); Tulard (2007).12The Mémoires and the men who wrote themThe Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sûreté, jusqu’en 1827 appeared from the Paris publisher Tenon in four volumes in 1828 and 1829. The full title of the first volume added that the author was now “propriétaire et fabricant de papier, à Saint-Mandé,” a property owner and paper manufacturer, which RetroNews reads as an open bid for respectability. According to the same article, the first volume came out in the last quarter of 1828.The preface, signed by Vidocq, tells a strange story. He had finished the manuscript in January 1828, he wrote, but in February broke his right arm in five places and for six weeks was in danger of his life. The publisher, in a hurry, supplied a reviser, and “comme tant d’autres, qui ne s’en vantent pas, j’eus un teinturier”: like many others who do not boast of it, I had a ghostwriter. When Vidocq finally read the printed sheets, he said, he found his narrative “entièrement changée,” entirely changed. The facts were broadly the same, but everything accidental and spontaneous in his life now read as long premeditation of evil, so that he became “en quelque sorte le Cartouche de l’époque,” a sort of Cartouche of the age, after the legendary bandit, “n’ayant ni sensibilité, ni conscience, ni regrets, ni repentir,” with no feeling, conscience, regret or repentance.The literary scholar Grégoire Holtz, in a 2011 study of the collective writing of the Mémoires in the journal Poétique, notes that the word “teinturier” in Vidocq’s preface means exactly what would later be called a literary ghostwriter. Holtz reads the preface as the story of Vidocq reclaiming his voice: the former convict had to buy back his manuscript, prepared to tear up the rewritten version, and then, “afin de sauver la spéculation du libraire,” to save the publisher’s investment, accepted the reworked text. RetroNews adds that the ghostwriter also published extracts of the book in several London newspapers.Who the writers were is not settled. French Wikipedia says the sources agree that several ghostwriters, “probablement” Louis-François L’Héritier de l’Ain and Émile Morice, wrote and reworked much of the work from Vidocq’s notes. A 1911 edition annotated by Eugène Villiod is catalogued by the Bibliothèque nationale de France as “rédigés par É. Morice et L.-F. L’Héritier,” written up by Morice and L’Héritier; that title was seen only in a search record, as Gallica blocked direct access. Holtz does not name them.Reviewers were not kind. RetroNews quotes Le Figaro mocking a man who now signed himself “Fabricant de papiers” and opened his book with: “Je vole ; ensuite je suis déserteur ; enfin je deviens mouchard.” I steal; then I am a deserter; finally I become an informer. Within weeks a rival anonymous book appeared, the Mémoires d’un forçat ou Vidocq dévoilé, the memoirs of a convict, or Vidocq unmasked, which claimed among other things that he had not broken his arm at all but had been beaten up by former convicts. RetroNews says its authors were eventually unmasked as the writer Louis-François Raban and the serial novelist Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire. English Wikipedia says only that two journalists published it under the pseudonym of a criminal named Malgaret.Sources: Mémoires, tome 1 (PG 38057); French Wikipedia; Cau, RetroNews (2018); Holtz, Poétique (2011); Gallica catalogue title (search record only); English Wikipedia.13Saint-Mandé, a return and a second exitWith the money from his police years and his book, Vidocq set up a paper factory at Saint-Mandé, just east of Paris. English Wikipedia says he mainly employed released convicts, men and women, which caused a scandal, and that customers expected lower prices from such a workforce. He married again at Saint-Mandé on January 28, 1830; French Wikipedia says his wife was his first cousin, eighteen years younger. The factory failed. English Wikipedia dates his bankruptcy to 1831, and Holtz says simply that he came out of the venture ruined.The July Revolution of 1830 brought a new regime, and in 1832 a new prefect of police, Henri Gisquet. On March 31, 1832, Tulard writes, Vidocq became head of the police de sûreté again. English Wikipedia says the reappointment followed useful tips in a burglary at Fontainebleau that led to eight arrests, and that rivals then spread a rumour he had arranged that theft himself to prove he was indispensable.The second term lasted about seven months. In June 1832 an uprising broke out in Paris during the funeral of General Jean Maximilien Lamarque, and Vidocq was accused of having led the repression that followed. Tulard says the newspaper La Tribune portrayed him as an agent provocateur. French Wikipedia adds that the opposition press attacked Gisquet for staged provocations by his police, symbolized by the convict brigade, and that one paper ran caricatures playing on the physical resemblance between Vidocq and King Louis-Philippe.Gisquet had other ideas. “Jusque-là,” he wrote in his own memoirs, in the passage Tulard quotes, “on pensait généralement qu’on ne pouvait faire la police des voleurs qu’avec des voleurs. Je voulus essayer de la faire faire par des gens honnêtes.” Until then it was generally thought that thieves could only be policed by thieves. I wanted to try having it done by honest men. Vidocq resigned on November 15, 1832, citing his wife’s ill health and the need to supervise his establishment at Saint-Mandé. The same day, French Wikipedia’s article on the service records, Gisquet created the Service de la Sûreté to replace the brigade of former convicts. Pierre Allard took charge, with Louis Canler as his principal inspector.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French); Holtz (2011); Tulard (2007).14The Bureau de renseignementsWithin days of leaving the police, Vidocq went into business as a detective. French Wikipedia says that a few days after his final departure he founded the “Bureau de renseignements universels dans l’intérêt du commerce,” a universal information bureau in the interest of commerce, at 12 rue Cloche-Perce in Paris, devoted to “recherches et explorations dans l’intérêt des personnes lésées,” inquiries on behalf of injured parties. English Wikipedia and the Criminocorpus record of his 1843 trial both give the founding year as 1833. The office later moved to the galerie Vivienne; French Wikipedia gives the address as number 13.The historian Dominique Kalifa, whose 2000 book Naissance de la police privée traced private detective agencies in France from 1832 to 1942, is the most careful guide to what the Bureau was. As French Wikipedia summarizes him, there were already hundreds of general business agencies, but Vidocq’s stood out for a “double vocation”: commercial intelligence and surveillance of swindlers on behalf of merchants, and work in “l’intérêt des familles,” on adultery, inheritances and disappearances. Kalifa declines to cast Vidocq as “ce précurseur absolu que la tradition se plaît à reconnaître,” the absolute pioneer tradition likes to see, but concludes that the Bureau was a “prototype” of private policing. Reviewing the book in the Annales in 2002, the historian Christophe Prochasson described Vidocq’s agency as “l’une des plus illustres,” one of the most illustrious, of the multipurpose information agencies of the 1830s.Tulard calls him one of the first private detectives in French history. Vidocq claimed more than 8,000 clients, according to French Wikipedia, and during his trial he gave the agency’s motto as « Haine et guerre aux fripons, dévouement sans bornes au commerce »: hatred and war on rogues, boundless devotion to commerce. English Wikipedia says his first staff was eleven detectives, two clerks and a secretary, again mostly former convicts, and that they sometimes used illegal means against the swindlers and bankruptcy fraudsters they pursued.Sources: French Wikipedia, quoting Kalifa; English Wikipedia; Criminocorpus record 117670 (search record only); Prochasson, Annales (2002); Tulard (2007).15Charged in 1837, convicted and acquitted in 1843On November 28, 1837, English Wikipedia says, the police searched his premises and seized more than 3,500 files and documents. He was arrested a few days later and charged with three offences: obtaining money by deception, corrupting public officials and usurping public functions. In February 1838, after many witnesses had testified, the judge dismissed all three charges. French Wikipedia tells it differently: the agency was closed in 1837 by court decision, Vidocq was imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie and acquitted after a year. Either way, it ended without a conviction.The second case was more serious. On August 17, 1842, according to English Wikipedia, 75 police officers acting for the prefect Gabriel Delessert raided his office and arrested him and one of his agents. The Criminocorpus record of the published trial report, the Procès de Vidocq printed by the Observateur des tribunaux in 1843, summarizes the charges: arbitrary arrest and sequestration of Pierre Champaix, and swindling at the expense of the marquis Duvivier. English Wikipedia describes the background as an embezzlement inquiry in which Vidocq had made an illegal arrest and demanded a bill of exchange for embezzled money from the man he detained.He spent months in custody in the Conciergerie. English Wikipedia dates the first hearings to May 3, 1843, before a judge it names as Michel Barbou and describes as a close friend of Delessert, and says the trial also examined other matters, including his moneylending and allegations that he had delivered women to convents against their will at their families’ request. The Criminocorpus record dates the judgment to May 5, 1843: the sixth correctional chamber of Paris sentenced him to five years in prison, despite the defence of the lawyer Jules Favre. English Wikipedia adds a fine of 3,000 francs.He appealed at once. On July 22, 1843, after a plea by Maître Landrin, the Cour royale acquitted him; the Criminocorpus record’s phrase is “la Cour le relaxe.” English Wikipedia credits the intervention of political friends and says the appeal hearing took a matter of minutes, after eleven months in the Conciergerie. The acquittal was final; the May conviction was overturned.The damage was done anyway. English Wikipedia says the case was ruinously expensive, that business at the Bureau suffered, and that Delessert tried without success to have him expelled from Paris as a former criminal.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French); Criminocorpus record 117670 (search record only).16London, 1848 and the last yearsIn the years after the trial, English Wikipedia says, Vidocq published several small books answering the rumours about him, and in 1844 an essay on prisons, the bagnes and the death penalty, the Considérations sommaires sur les prisons, les bagnes et la peine de mort listed by French Wikipedia. The same year brought Les Vrais Mystères de Paris, a novel published under his name. His third wife died on September 22, 1847, according to English Wikipedia.In 1845, French Wikipedia says, he went to London, ruined, gave paid lectures on the strength of his reputation, and sold patents for his inventions, the forgery-proof paper and a lock that could not be picked.After the revolution of February 1848, English Wikipedia says Vidocq offered his services to the provisional government led by Alphonse de Lamartine and was set to watching political opponents, including Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, and that he stood as a candidate in the 2nd arrondissement in the elections that year and received one vote. French Wikipedia says that during the riots of May 15, 1848, he let himself be imprisoned in the Conciergerie and worked there as an informer.In 1849 he was jailed briefly one last time, charged with fraud; the case was dropped. He withdrew into private life and took small cases. English Wikipedia says unwise investments cost him much of his money and that his right arm, badly broken years earlier, caused him great pain. In July 1854, French Wikipedia says, he survived cholera at the age of 79. Paralysis reached his legs on April 30, 1857, and he died at home at 2 rue Saint-Pierre-Popincourt in Paris on May 11, 1857, at the age of 81.English Wikipedia says the funeral was held at the church of Saint-Denys du Saint-Sacrement and that it is not known where he is buried, mentioning a rumour of a grave at Saint-Mandé that is in fact registered to his last wife. French Wikipedia, citing the daily burial register of Père-Lachaise cemetery for May 12, 1857, says he was buried the next day in the 20th division there, line 4, grave 11, and that the grave was cleared and no longer existed by the end of the nineteenth century. The register was not examined directly; the conflict is flagged.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French); Commons category for Vidocq (London engraving excluded).17Vautrin, Valjean and DupinTulard calls Vidocq, through the success of the Mémoires, “le père du roman policier,” the father of the detective novel: his stories were a mine for any author in search of subjects. English Wikipedia says Vidocq befriended Honoré de Balzac in 1822, and French Wikipedia records that in 1834 he attended the dinners of Benjamin Appert, where Balzac, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were also guests.Balzac’s debt is the clearest. Vautrin, the master criminal who appears in Le Père Goriot and returns in Illusions perdues and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, is described by Tulard, by Berlière and by both Wikipedia articles as inspired by Vidocq. Tulard notes that Balzac, in La Dernière Incarnation de Vautrin, gives the reason a convict might betray his world: to become the bagne’s supplier instead of its tenant. Berlière writes that Balzac borrowed heavily from Vidocq and from his agent Coco Lacour for the character. Balzac also put Vautrin on the stage, in a play that opened in 1840.Tulard also names the Jean Valjean of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables and the policeman Jackal in Dumas’s Les Mohicans de Paris as characters inspired by him. English Wikipedia adds Javert, Hugo’s inspector, and more distant descendants, from Eugène Sue’s Mystères de Paris to Émile Gaboriau’s Monsieur Lecoq. Those wider claims are uncited there and not relied on here.In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Edgar Allan Poe’s detective C. Auguste Dupin dismisses him: “Vidocq, for example, was a good guesser and a persevering man. But, without educated thought, he erred continually by the very intensity of his investigations. He impaired his vision by holding the object too close.” English Wikipedia says it is believed that Poe was prompted by a story about Vidocq to create Dupin, the first detective of fiction. The line is in the story; the influence is an inference.Sources: Tulard (2007); Wikipedia (English and French); Berlière (1993); Poe, Works, volume 1 (PG 2147).18The Vidocq Society and the long shadowEnglish Wikipedia records that in September 1905, when the Sûreté exhibited portraits of its former heads, the series began with his successor, Allard, and a newspaper reported being told that Vidocq had never been head of the Sûreté. French Wikipedia’s article on the Service de la Sûreté says the service was created in 1832 precisely to replace his brigade of former convicts.In the United States the name went the other way. The Vidocq Society, according to its own website, “was founded in 1990 in Philadelphia, PA, to assist homicide investigators in the resolution of long unsolved homicides.” English Wikipedia says its members are forensic specialists, profilers and investigators who meet to review cold cases free of charge. In France, the Poste issued a stamp with his likeness in 2003 in a series called “Destinées romanesques,” French Wikipedia says, and since 2019 a Prix Vidocq has honoured the best French crime series at the Séries Mania festival.Berlière’s essay on real and fictional police ends on the same note. The myth that novels and the press built around the police, he wrote, makes it harder still to analyse calmly and scientifically a world and practices marked by “l’ombre de Fouché et de Vidocq,” the shadow of Fouché and of Vidocq. Vidocq was the convict who showed what a police force built on informers could do, and what it would cost.Sources: Wikipedia (English and French); vidocq.org; Berlière (1993).19What the record leaves openThe court record settles a short list of facts about Eugène François Vidocq. He was convicted of forgery at Douai on December 27, 1796, and sentenced to eight years of hard labour. He was pardoned by Louis XVIII, in 1817 or 1818. He was charged in 1837 and the charges were dismissed. He was convicted at first instance in May 1843 and acquitted on appeal on July 22, 1843. A fraud charge in 1849 was dropped. The prefects who employed him, Pasquier and Gisquet, confirmed in their own memoirs that he escaped from the bagnes and that he led a brigade of former convicts until 1832.Almost everything else comes, in whole or in part, from Mémoires he did not entirely write: the duels, the boyhood thefts, the nun’s habit, the leap into the Scarpe, the disguises and much of the detective work. Tulard’s warning still applies: with the Préfecture’s archives burned in 1871, nothing is known for certain. The sources disagree on the day he was born, the weeks of his escape from Brest, the year of his pardon, the year he founded his agency, the dates of his 1843 trial and the place where he is buried. And they leave open the question that the prefect Gisquet raised in 1832 and Berlière’s “syndrome de Vidocq” names: whether a police built on thieves to catch thieves was a necessity of its time, or the habit that later reformers spent a century trying to break.Sources: Drawn from the sections above.20Frequently asked questionsWhat was Vidocq convicted of?On December 27, 1796, the criminal court at Douai convicted Vidocq, together with César Herbaux, of forgery of public documents and sentenced him to eight years of hard labour. The case began in the prison at Lille, where, by his account, two other inmates borrowed his cell to write something he knew nothing about. He always denied taking part in the forgery. He was later pardoned by royal letters, in 1817 according to English Wikipedia and in 1818 according to French Wikipedia and his own preface.Did Vidocq really escape from the bagnes?The escapes are supported, though most of the detail is his own. The police prefect Pasquier wrote in his own memoirs that Vidocq had been held after two or three escapes from the bagnes of Brest and Toulon, the strongest contemporary evidence in this file. The sources date the Brest escape differently, and both Wikipedia articles date the Toulon escape to March 6, 1800. Episodes such as the nun’s habit and the leap into the Scarpe come from the Mémoires and have no independent corroboration in the saved sources.Did Vidocq write his Mémoires himself?Only in part. The four volumes appeared from the Paris publisher Tenon in 1828 and 1829. In the preface, Vidocq says he broke his right arm, the publisher supplied a reviser, and when he read the printed sheets he found his narrative entirely changed. French Wikipedia says the sources agree that several ghostwriters, probably Louis-François L’Héritier de l’Ain and Émile Morice, wrote and reworked much of the work from his notes. The historian Jean Tulard called the stories probably heavily arranged.What happened at his 1843 trial?After a police raid on his office on August 17, 1842, Vidocq was tried on charges that the published trial report summarizes as arbitrary arrest and sequestration, and swindling. The Criminocorpus record dates the judgment to May 5, 1843, when the sixth correctional chamber of Paris sentenced him to five years in prison. He appealed at once, and on July 22, 1843, the Cour royale acquitted him. The acquittal was final and the May conviction was overturned. English Wikipedia says the case was ruinously expensive.Citations & SourcesSources21 Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sûreté, jusqu’en 1827, tomes 1 to 3 (Paris: Tenon, 1828), Project Gutenberg 38057, 38058 and 38059, transcribed from images supplied by the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Gallica). Bibliothèque nationale de France, Gallica catalogue records: Mémoires de Vidocq, tome 1 (1828); Mémoires de Vidocq, edition annotated by Eugène Villiod (1911); Procès de Vidocq (1843); Histoire de Vidocq. Seen through search records; Gallica blocked direct access during this check. Jean Tulard, “Eugène-François Vidocq,” Recueil des Commémorations nationales 2007, FranceArchives. François Cau, “1828 : les Mémoires controversées du commissaire Vidocq,” RetroNews, Bibliothèque nationale de France, March 20, 2018. Grégoire Holtz, “Des textes ensauvagés ? L’écriture collective des Mémoires,” Poétique 165 (2011), pages 37 to 51, via Cairn. Jean-Marc Berlière, “Police réelle et police fictive,” Romantisme 79 (1993), pages 73 to 90, via Persée. Christophe Prochasson, review of Dominique Kalifa, Naissance de la police privée (Plon, 2000), Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 57:6 (2002), pages 1682 to 1683, via Persée. Criminocorpus, bibliography record 117670 (Jean-Claude Farcy): Procès de Vidocq, Observateur des tribunaux, 1843. Seen through a search record; the site refused connections during this check. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” in The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, volume 1, Project Gutenberg 2147. The Vidocq Society: vidocq.org. Wikipedia (French): Eugène-François Vidocq; Service de la Sûreté. Wikipedia (English): Eugène François Vidocq; Sûreté. Images: Wikimedia Commons, credited in each caption. Image creditsImage: Achille Devéria / Paris Musées, Musée Carnavalet, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (CC0).Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Image: Marie Gabrielle Coignet, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.Image: George Cruikshank, via West Virginia University Libraries and Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.