Eugène-François Vidocq: The Convict Who Became the World's First Detective
Before Sherlock Holmes, before Scotland Yard had detectives and before anyone thought to make a plaster cast of a footprint, there was Eugène-François Vidocq. He was a thief, a forger, a deserter and a duellist who broke out of more prisons than most people have ever seen. On one occasion he got away dressed as a nun.
Then he switched sides. The man the French police couldn't keep locked up ended up running their first plainclothes detective unit, staffed almost entirely by crooks. After that he opened what's usually called the world's first private detective agency, patented a forgery-proof paper and inspired half the great characters of 19th-century French fiction. Honestly, if you made his life up, nobody would believe you.
Quick Answers
Who was Vidocq? A French criminal turned crime-fighter (1775 to 1857) who founded the Sûreté, the plainclothes detective force of the Paris police.
Why's he called the first detective? He ran the first known undercover detective unit, then opened the Bureau des Renseignements, widely described as the first private detective agency.
Who did he inspire? Balzac's Vautrin and Poe's Dupin both owe him a debt, and Victor Hugo seems to have split him in two to create Jean Valjean and Javert.
When did he die? On 11 May 1857 in Paris, aged 81.
A Baker's Son With Sticky Fingers
Vidocq was born in Arras, northern France, in July 1775. His parents ran a bakery and were comfortably off, which turned out to be a problem, because young Eugène had a habit of helping himself. He was locked up at 13 for nicking the family silver, and a year later he emptied his parents' till and legged it to Ostend, planning to sail for America.
The money ran out before he got anywhere near a boat. So he did what any teenage runaway would do and joined a travelling circus. As the Public Domain Review tells it, he started as a stable boy, then got billed as a savage cannibal in a freak show. Along the way he was attacked by monkeys, broke his nose trying to learn somersaults and took a beating for refusing to bite into a live chicken on stage.
His next gig was with a puppet troupe. That ended when he was caught with the puppet master's wife, apparently during a Punch and Judy show. His mother forgave him and his father, probably out of ideas, packed him off to the army.
Soldier, Deserter, Duellist
France was at war with half of Europe in the early 1790s, so there was plenty of soldiering to be done. Vidocq fought the Prussians and learned to handle a sword, which he then used a lot. By his own tally he fought 16 duels and only lost two.
Discipline wasn't really his thing, though. He deserted, swapped regiments, briefly fought for the Austrians against France and drifted into the armée roulante, a roving band of deserters and petty crooks who got by on forged papers and stolen uniforms. In 1795 he passed himself off as a captain in Brussels and fell in with a crowd of card sharps. At another point he posed as an Austrian officer to get his hands on a wealthy widow's money.
The Forgery That Sent Him to the Galleys
The crime that changed everything was a fairly small one. While locked up in Lille, Vidocq got mixed up in forging a release order for a fellow prisoner, a peasant who'd been serving six years for stealing grain. It was discovered, and in 1798 he was sentenced to eight years of hard labour in the galleys at Brest.
By then the galleys weren't actually ships. The bagnes were brutal shore prisons in naval ports where convicts were chained together and worked half to death. They were eventually replaced by penal colonies overseas, which is how men like Henri Charrière ended up on Devil's Island a century later.
The Great Escaper
Vidocq didn't stay at Brest long. Crime Library says he bribed a guard for a set of sailor's clothes and simply walked out after eight days. He later hid in a convent dressed as a nun, which worked for a while until he was caught again and shipped off to the galleys at Toulon with his sentence doubled.
Toulon didn't hold him either. This time he slipped out of town by joining a funeral procession and playing the part of a grieving mourner. His memoirs claim he escaped every French galley and more than 20 prisons, and while he wasn't shy about exaggerating, the authorities clearly struggled with him. France wouldn't produce an escape artist to match him until Jacques Mesrine came along in the 1970s.
Charles Dickens's magazine All the Year Round recounted some of his antics in 1860, and they're a mix of genius and farce. When a commissary turned up with four men to arrest him over dinner, Vidocq ushered them into a small room and locked them in. On another occasion he threw a gendarme's cloak and cocked hat over himself in the middle of a court hearing and strolled out. Not every attempt went to plan, mind. Trying to squeeze through a hole in a prison wall, he got stuck and had to shout for the sentry, who dragged him out minus a fair bit of skin.
Life on the run had other hazards too. He joined a gang of highway robbers, the kind of men romanticised in tales of Dick Turpin, but they threw him out when they spotted a galley mark on his shirt. Even crooks didn't trust a convict.
Switching Sides
By 1809 Vidocq was 34, tired and back in Paris under a false name. So he made the boldest move of his life. He walked up to the police and offered to become an informer in exchange for his freedom.
The authorities took him up on it. For 21 months he sat in Bicêtre and La Force prisons playing the role of a harmless family man, gaining the trust of hardened criminals and passing everything he heard to the police chief Jean Henry. In 1811 Henry arranged for him to escape, which did wonders for his reputation in the underworld. Nobody suspected a man who'd just broken out of La Force.
Back on the streets, he went undercover in a string of disguises. He played a pirate, an elderly thief and even a British barrister, and at one point posed as a smuggler called Jules to get inside a gang. Dozens of his old associates went to prison, and several went to the guillotine.
A Police Force Made of Crooks
Vidocq's results were so good that around 1811 to 1812 he was put in charge of a new plainclothes unit, the Brigade de la Sûreté. It started with a handful of men and almost all of them were ex-convicts, on the logic that it takes a thief to catch a thief. Agents were paid per case rather than a salary, and one pickpocket he recruited promptly stole his boss's watch.
The Sûreté grew to 28 agents, including several women, which was unheard of at the time. Crime Library notes they made 811 arrests in 1817 alone, and in one raid on a tavern Vidocq hauled in 38 men in a single night. The unit was later credited with cutting crime in Paris by around 40 percent, although that figure came largely from Vidocq's own camp.
What really set him apart was his method. He kept a card index of criminals with their descriptions, aliases and habits, which was decades ahead of its time. Later in the century, Alphonse Bertillon took the idea much further with his system of criminal classification. He took plaster casts of footprints, compared handwriting on forged documents and, in an 1822 murder case, had a bullet removed from a body to compare it with a suspect's pistol. He even tried recording fingerprints but couldn't find an ink that worked.
Of course, a police unit run by an ex-con using ex-cons wasn't spotless. Complaints flooded in about bribes, entrapment and crimes staged purely so the Sûreté could solve them. Awkwardly, Vidocq was technically still a fugitive himself until he finally got a pardon in 1817 or 1818, depending on which account you trust.
Memoirs, Paper Mills and the 1832 Barricades
When his patron Henry retired, Vidocq's new boss made his life miserable and he left the Sûreté in 1827. He cashed in with his memoirs, published in four volumes in 1828 and 1829. They were a smash hit, partly ghostwritten and wildly embellished, and Vidocq complained the ghostwriter had made a mess of them. By 1829 London theatregoers could watch a stage version called Vidocq! The French Police Spy.
He also opened a paper mill at Saint-Mandé, just outside Paris, staffed by former convicts of both sexes. It was a decent idea that sank under local hostility and rising costs, and he went bankrupt by 1831.
So he went back to the police. In June 1832 he led a small group of agents clearing barricades during the Paris uprising, the very rebellion Victor Hugo later used as the climax of Les Misérables. It didn't last, though. A purge of officers with criminal records and a scandal involving one of his agents saw him resign for good that November.
The World's First Private Eye
Vidocq wasn't the type to sit about. Within weeks or months, depending on the source, he'd launched Le Bureau des Renseignements, an information bureau that's widely seen as the first private detective agency. Today I Found Out places its first office on the rue Cloche-Perce in the Marais, and by 1838 it had moved to the smart Galerie Vivienne.
The agency did a bit of everything. Businesses paid a subscription for background reports on customers, drawn from Vidocq's old police files, which basically made it an early credit bureau. Private clients hired him to follow cheating spouses, track down runaway heirs and recover stolen property. The poet Alfred de Vigny used his services, and among the more ridiculous jobs were recovering a doctor's pet cockatoo and the Mayor of Rouen's racehorse. At its peak it had around 40 agents and saw more than 40 clients a day.
Somewhere in all this Vidocq found time to patent an indelible ink and a paper that was almost impossible to tamper with. The Strand Magazine reckons the paper later became the basis for French banknotes.
The police loathed the competition and raided his offices more than once. In 1842 he was arrested after a swindler he'd tracked down accused the agency of coercion, and prosecutors also claimed he'd posed as a police officer. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in 1843, then freed when the verdict was overturned on appeal. The legal bills and seized files did the damage anyway, and the agency never fully recovered.
London, Disguises and a Pension Mystery
Vidocq's fame had spread across the Channel. In 1835 he gave evidence to a House of Lords committee on what happened to prisoners after release, and in 1845 he took an exhibition of his disguises and criminal curiosities to the Cosmorama on Regent Street. He even explored opening a London branch of his agency, though it never happened.
After the 1848 revolution he reportedly did undercover work for Louis-Napoleon, the future Emperor Napoleon III. Then things get murky. One version says he died almost broke, with under 3,000 francs to his name. Another claims he'd stashed his fortune in paintings and property, then turned up to plead for a bigger police pension dressed as a beggar. Given his track record, either is completely believable.
A Suitably Strange Ending
Vidocq survived cholera in 1854 but suffered a stroke in April 1857. He died at home in Paris on 11 May, aged 81, having confessed to a priest beforehand. The police turned up on the day he died and confiscated his files.
Then came the will. Eleven different women came forward, each claiming to be the sole beneficiary. Even in death he'd managed to leave a trail of chaos and at least a few broken hearts. One local paper used his obituary to accuse him of pocketing money he'd been paid to catch thieves, while his friend, the poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine, defended him as an honest man.
The Man Behind Valjean, Javert and Vautrin
Vidocq knocked about with the literary stars of Paris, including Hugo, Balzac, Dumas and Gautier. Pretty much all of them helped themselves to his life story. Balzac turned him into Vautrin, the master criminal of Le Père Goriot who eventually becomes head of the police. Hugo seems to have split him neatly in two. Jean Valjean is the convict of superhuman strength who goes straight and runs a factory, while Javert is the relentless policeman hunting him.
Across the Atlantic, Edgar Allan Poe gave him a backhanded nod in The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841, with Dupin dismissing him as "a good guesser, and a persevering man." Since Dupin helped inspire Sherlock Holmes, you can draw a line straight from a French convict to Baker Street. By the late 1800s American dime novels were churning out knock-offs with titles like Violet Vane, the Ventriloquist Vidocq.
His real legacy is in modern policing. The Sûreté's approach of plainclothes officers, criminal records and physical evidence fed into the detective branches that followed in London and beyond, the same forces that went on to chase Victorian master crooks like Adam Worth, the real-life Napoleon of crime. Today the Vidocq Society, founded in Philadelphia in 1990, brings together forensic experts and former investigators to work on cold cases in his name. Vincent Cassel played him in the 2018 film L'Empereur de Paris, and he even pops up in Assassin's Creed.
Not bad for a baker's boy who once ran off to be a pretend cannibal in a circus.
Suggested Reading
Want more Vidocq? These two are the best places to start.
The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq by James Morton. The go-to modern biography, sorting out which of Vidocq's tall tales actually stand up.
Memoirs of Vidocq: Master of Crime by Eugène-François Vidocq. The man in his own words. Take roughly half of it with a pinch of salt and enjoy the ride.
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Sources
Eugène-François Vidocq and the Birth of the Detective, The Public Domain Review
Vidocq: Convict Turned Detective Magnifique, Crime Library
The Great Detectives: Vidocq, The Strand Magazine
The First Detective, Today I Found Out
All the Year Round, Volume III (1860), page 333, Dickens Journals Online
The Life of Monsieur Vidocq, The Vidocq Society
