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     Looking back on his turbulent career, Eugène-François Vidocq avowed only two regrets: he had been excessively fond of dueling and women.¹ This confession, though, was made only on Vidocq's deathbed and came too late to persuade us that this lion even in his winter would have changed in any respect the eighty-two adventurous years of which he had been the triumphant hero. Successively petty thief, vagabond, soldier, deserter, convicted forger, escaped prisoner, privateer, fugitive from justice, and police spy, Vidocq ultimately took up the battle of society against the underworld from which he emerged. He became one of the founders of the French detective police service, and his personality and career have strongly influenced detective fiction and nineteenth-century French literature.
     Born to a family of bakers in the northern French city of Arras on July 24, 1775, François Vidocq was both a prodigal and a prodigious son. A brawler by nature (which endowed him with a compact Herculean build) and a precocious womanizer, even by French standards, he had only to acquire skill in dueling to assure that his youth and early manhood would be marked by violent episodes. A researcher attempting to fix the number of lives Vidocq claimed on the field of honor has to choose among as many alternative calculations as bedevil those who investigate the alleged early murders of Billy the Kid.
     The young Vidocq showed not only a streak of violence but a penchant for thievery. After robbing his parents' bakery till and pilfering their poultry and silverware, he accepted a bad companion's plan for wholesale theft. After luring his mother away, he and his friend entered the bakery by use of a counterfeit key, forced the cash counter and stole 2,000 francs. Deciding to embark for America, Vidocq found himself instead to be the "biter bit"; in the Belgian port of Ostend he was drugged and robbed of his booty with the complicity of prostitutes whom, while still awake, he had found to be quite charming.
     At this point begins one of the great picaresque adventures in early nineteenth-century France. Vidocq joined a traveling menagerie where, after wearisome roustabout days setting up tent lights and cleaning animals' cages, he tried his skills as an acrobat and as a synthetic wild man who cracked pebbles with his teeth to please the public. After this unpromising introduction to the world of entertainment, the youthful wanderer left the circus for a marionette show. There he enjoyed a brief 

idyll with the puppeteer's young wife, but, chased away by the wrathful husband, François thought it best to return home to Arras where he received his parents' forgiveness.
     In 1791 Vidocq enrolled in the Bourbon Regiment and in the following year fought at Valmy, where he was named corporal of grenadiers on the battlefield. On his first day in this new rank he quarreled with his sergeant-major and assaulted him to provoke a duel. Facing prosecution for the capital offense he had committed in striking a superior officer, Vidocq surreptitiously left his corps to join another French regiment. Now he began to be haunted by a new fear -- that he would be arrested as a deserter from the Bourbon Regiment; he therefore went over to the enemy forces of the Austrians. Treason proved to suit him even less than his earlier state of anxiety, so he soon returned to the French side, posing as a Belgian abandoning the Austrian colors. With all these vicissitudes behind him, Vidocq was only seventeen years old. More troubles lay ahead.
     During the period of the French Terror, Vidocq was imprisoned after quarreling with a regimental musician over a woman. Learning that he had been denounced by his rival to the powerful terrorist Chevalier, Vidocq decided with alacrity to woo and later propose marriage to Chevalier's sister, who became the first of Vidocq's two wives. Vidocq later commented wryly: "I was plainly told to choose: marriage or the guillotine. One chooses the lesser of two evils."² The marriage was not a blessed one; Vidocq soon discovered his wife in flagrante delicto with an adjutant-major stationed at Arras.
     Following a brief period of employment by a former officer of the Bourbon Regiment, Vidocq was arrested for lack of identity papers and promptly effectuated the first of the many escapes for which he became legendary, exiting a window through the use of his bed linen. Vidocq then joined the so-called "Roving Army", composed of vagabonds posing as army officers; these swindlers were "officers without troops, with forged movement orders, always travelling, always getting accommodations, rations and forage, always about to join units at which they never arrived."³
     After his first visit in 1795 to Paris where he was skinned by a prostitute, Vidocq traveled for a while with a medical charlatan, who turned out to be a member of a violent burglar gang. This association was not to Vidocq's taste so he fled to Courtrai, where one of the most 

fateful events in his life befell him: he fought with a captain of engineers for the favors of a woman and was sentenced to three months in prison.
     It was while serving this prison sentence that Vidocq lent his room to two men, Grouard and Herbaux, who used its seclusion to forge a document releasing another prisoner Sébastien Boutel, the father of a large family, who had been condemned to six years for the theft of cereal to feed his children. Vidocq always claimed unconvincingly that the contents of the document drawn in his cell were unknown to him, but the three conspirators combined to throw the blame on him and he was given eight years at hard labor.
     For more than a decade after this conviction, Vidocq's life fell into a recurrent pattern of imprisonment, daring escape and rearrest often due to betrayal; French prison escape literature particularly savors his flight from Brest disguised as a nun. During intermittent periods of vigilant freedom Vidocq applied himself to many trades, including service on board a corsair ship La Revanche preying on English shipping in the Channel, and the more peaceful occupations of linendraper, peddler and haberdasher. Under constant pressure from escaped convicts to join their criminal enterprises, Vidocq by 1809 had had enough of life on the run; he gave himself up to Monsieur Henry, the so-called "Evil Angel" who presided over the criminal department of the Paris police. After testing Vidocq's loyalty as a prison spy, Henry admitted him to regular service as a police agent. In 1811 Vidocq was named leader of a new brigade de la sûreté (security brigade) housed in independent quarters outside the police prefecture.
     Vidocq served as head of the Sûreté for seventeen years in the aggregate, resigning in 1827 and returning to his old position in 1832 for a tenure of less than a year. The paramilitary highlight of his second term of service was his defense of the police prefecture and the Ile de la Cité against insurgent forces in the unsuccessful uprising against Louis Philippe.
     By the time of his first resignation, Vidocq had never had more than thirty agents serving under him. Many of these he drew from the ranks of ex-convicts who, like himself, had personal acquaintances with many active criminals and knew only too well the tricks of the underworld. Reliance on former criminals had its drawbacks; it was not uncommon for police agents to slip back into unlawful activity and to plot against their Argus-eyed chief. Also, Vidocq's easy communication with the underworld spurred the frequent complaint that he encouraged underlings and informers to act as agents provocateurs. Suspicions of this kind following a restaurant robbery involving an ex-employee of the establishment who was in the pay of the Sûreté led to Vidocq's final resignation from the police service in 1832. (The circumstances of his earlier 

resignation are murkier but may have involved a personality conflict with a foppish superior).
     The triumphs of Vidocq's detection at the Surete have lost none of their lustre despite the fact that his career preceded the advances of modern forensic science. The master sleuth, for example, proved the participation of burglar and former police agent Hotot in a break-in by matching his hobnailed boots against prints observed at the crime scene. When the fragment of a letter was found near the site of the armed robbery of the butcher Fontaine, Vidocq was able to reconstruct accurately the full message, which indicated that the attackers had ties with a wine dram-shop in Clignancourt. One of the Sûreté chief's most famous coups, celebrated in woodcuts of the era, was his success in foiling the planned attack on a coach in the forest of Sénart; Vidocq filled the diligence with police agents, except for four passengers whose safety he was later criticized for putting at risk. Perhaps the most famous criminal arrested by Vidocq was the ex-convict Pierre Coignard, who was posing as a count at the French Court. In the midst of his ruthless professional duties Vidocq sometimes paused for strangely incongrous acts of humanity: his regular farewells to chained convicts being transported from Bicêtre to prison camps, or the memorable services he provided in connection with the arrest of the thief Sablin in Saint-Cloud. Sablin's pregnant mistress was so startled by Vidocq's intrusion into their bedroom that she went into labor; Vidocq stayed to act as midwife and later hosted a breakfast in honor of the newborn.
     During his years at the Sûreté, Vidocq was an equal-opportunity employer who was assisted in delicate police stings by female agents as well as by Annette, the most loyal of his mistresses. One of his clever agents, Mlle. Dionay, rented an apartment in a building where a forger sought by the police had her lodging. Vidocq's description of the policewoman's application to the concierge will ring true for visitors to Paris: "Mlle. Dionay gave all the information that the concierge appeared to desire concerning her morals and, more particularly, her solvency. For we know that in Paris there is a good deal more concern about the latter point than any other."⁴
     In 1833, after his second resignation from the Sûreté, Vidocq established a private detective agency (the Bureau des Renseignements or "Inquiries Office") that had its final home in the elegant Galerie Vivienne. In this new enterprise the former dread enemy of burglars and murderers protected Parisian businesses against the wiles of swindlers (faiseurs). One of the most widespread scams (also well known in 

England during the early nineteenth century) involved three invariable elements: the purchase of goods on credit, followed by a cash resale at a heavily discounted price, and the disappearance of the fast-money crook. Despite Vidocq's well-advertised commercial services, his agency also found time to resolve his clients' domestic embroilments, including abduction, adultery and blackmail.
     The official police of the capital did not look kindly at the emergence of a competitor in the private sector. They looked for every opportunity to shut down Vidocq's operations and found three. The police attacked first in 1837 following arrests of four employees of the Ministry of War charged with the theft of state papers. On the pretext that Vidocq might be implicated in this breach of security, the police searched his agency and carted off 3,500 dossiers. Vidocq, imprisoned for two months, engaged the prominent trial lawyer Charles Ledru to defend him against charges that went far beyond the original accusation of espionage and ranged from obtaining of money under false pretenses to corruption of members of the civil service and usurpation of public functions. After a thorough investigation the examining magistrate dismissed all counts.
     Six years later, in 1843, the police were on the offensive again, filing three new counts against Vidocq and his agency, now focusing principally on his alleged false arrest and imprisonment of a fraudulent debtor at the Galerie Vivienne offices. Vidocq was committed to the famed Conciergerie Prison, and this time the judicial proceedings were more worrisome.⁵ Convicted by the trial court, Vidocq appealed and was fully vindicated by the court of appeals.
     The vengeful police made one last assault, the most shameless of all. In September 1843, the prefect of police issued an order exiling Vidocq from Paris on the ground that he was an ex-convict, ignoring the fact that Vidocq had been pardoned for the ancient forgery by Louis XVIII and had twice served as a police official. Vidocq prepared to fight the prefect's order but did not have to do so, since the procurator-general intervened in his favor.
     As a practical matter, however, the repeated police harassment attained its objective; the Vidocq detective agency did not recover its former prosperity and closed in 1847.
     Still Vidocq's life remained eventful and productive. Between 1836 and 1846 he published three works of fact and fiction based on his knowledge of crime, The Thieves (1836), The True Mysteries of Paris (1844) and The "Chauffeurs" of the North (1845-6), the last title referring 

not to taxi-drivers but to a gang of ruffians who held householders' feet to the fire in order to force them to reveal the hiding places of their valuables.⁶ In 1845 Vidocq visited London where he installed a crime exhibition at the Cosmorama in Regent Street; the exhibits supposedly included the suspenders of Fieschi, who attempted to assassinate Louis Philippe with an "infernal machine," and the pen with which the serial killer and sociopath Lacenaire wrote his memoirs. Literature and celebrity touring did not, however, distract Vidocq from his main calling, for he served both Lamartine and Napoleon III as a police spy. One last time he was to reenter a prison cell; in February 1849 Vidocq was jailed for obtaining letters from a mistress of the Duc de Valençay while disguised as a priest. Shortly thereafter he was released without charges.
     Although Vidocq seemed invincible, he quietly surrendered to death at the age of 82 on May 11, 1857.
     Vidocq's battles with the police bureaucracy of his day appear to be reflected by the rather grudging assessment of his historical role that is to be found in modern police publications and literary encyclopedias. For example, the National Police Encyclopedia published in Paris after World War II specifies that it was not Vidocq but a later police official Henri Gisquet who is to be regarded as the founder of the present-day French Sûreté, the national detective police force that serves as France's equivalent of Scotland Yard. The encyclopedia states:

It is to Gisquet [prefect of police from 1831 to 1836,] that we owe the official creation of the service of the Sûreté, which up to then had constituted only a semi-informal group of investigators and informers under the direction of the famous Vidocq.⁷

apoleon's chief police officials, was content to serve until the end of the Emperor's reign under the modest appellation of "division head".⁸
     If one puts bureaucratic niceties aside and concentrates instead on function, it is readily apparent that Vidocq indeed laid the foundation for modern policing in France. A strong feature of his leadership was the institutionalization of the craft of detective policing; recognizing that his assistants and successors would not be able to match his own vast knowledge and memory of the underworld, Vidocq undertook to establish a police archive that would record the identities, descriptions, biographies, specialties and methods of the nation's criminals. Moreover, he understood and constantly reiterated that any police security force worthy of its name must be concerned not only with apprehension and conviction of criminals after the fact, but in crime prevention, through cultivation of informers, infiltration of gangs and foiling of plots before they could be effectuated. Vidocq summarized this idea aphoristically when asked what he meant by a "police de sûreté " or security police force; he responded: "A repressive police that is never preventive is a monstrosity."⁹
     Whatever controversy may remain about the precise contributions of Vidocq to police history, there is no room for the slightest cavil about his decisive impact on detective fiction and on towering works of French realist and romantic literature. One of the principal channels for the propagation of the Vidocq legend was the publication of the so-called Memoirs of Vidocq published in France in 1828 and immediately translated into English. The use of the qualification "so-called" is well merited, for Vidocq's original manuscript was adulterated by two successive editors Emile Morice and L.F. L'Heritier, who unscrupulously portrayed the detective's life in the lurid tones of popular melodrama. Fortunately, Vidocq's modern historian, Jean Savant, has disentangled the original narrative from these catchpenny excrescences.¹⁰
     Even when overlaid by the excesses of Vidocq's editors, the thrilling facts of his life inflamed the imagination of narrative geniuses. Edgar Allan Poe had Vidocq in mind when he created his French sleuth, Auguste Dupin, to solve the murders in the Rue Morgue. The disdainful Dupin bestows only qualified praise on his real-life predecessor:

Vidocq . . . 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. 

He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness, but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole. Thus, there is such a thing as being too profound.¹¹

Sherlock Holmes sniffed sardonically. "Lecoq was a miserable bungler," he said, in an angry voice; "he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. The question was how to identify an unknown prisoner. I could have done it in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a textbook for detectives to teach them what to avoid."¹⁴

to note that the narrative of Taylor's play follows closely the plot of the French play Leonard first published under the title Le Retour de Melun in 1860, three years after Vidocq's death.¹⁶ Critic Paul Gayot has acknowledged the debt of Maurice Leblanc's Arsene Lupin to Vidocq, noting that Lupin has a dual personality as criminal and law-enforcer; Leblanc's still-popular hero appears first as a burglar, then as a burglar pretending to be a policeman, and finally as a policeman in true colors. Like Vidocq, Arsene Lupin ultimately leaves the world of crime to become society's defender.¹⁷ Vidocq is also reflected in Flambeau, friend of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown; a reformed thief, Flambeau was proficient in the art of disguise despite his colossal size.
     The legacy of Vidocq to mainstream French literature of the nineteenth century is also extremely rich. Honore de Balzac admitted having based on Vidocq the criminal genius and subsequently police chief Vautrin, who haunts the pages of La Comedie Humaine, making his first appearance in Le Pere Goriot. When Hippolyte Castille objected that Vautrin was superhuman, Balzac responded: "I can assure you that the model exists, that he is a person of appalling greatness and that he has found his place in the world of our time."¹⁸ Balzac counted Vidocq among his friends and dined with him and the chief executioner of France, Monsieur Sanson, at the home of philanthropist Benjamin Appert, the director of the Journal of Prisons, on a memorable evening in 1834 shortly before the publication of Le Pere Goriot.¹⁹Jean Savant suggests that the name of Balzac's criminal hero Vautrin is in fact a nickname by which Vidocq was known in his natal Arras; in northern regional speech, the word vautrin means a wild boar, an animal whose social behavior struck the people of Arras as bearing a strong resemblance to the rampages of the quarrelsome young Vidocq.²⁰
     In many respects Balzac's Vautrin appears closely modeled after Vidocq. Both men are strong-willed and dominating titans with bear-like chests and bulging muscles. In the criminal record of each man an ancient conviction of forgery appears although, as the dramatist Félicien Marceau has observed, Balzac's Vautrin is not the sort of man to have 

committed only one crime.²¹ Both Vidocq and the fictional Vautrin use many false names and are masters of disguise; ultimately Vautrin, like Vidocq, throws in his lot with society by becoming a police chief. On the other hand, the criminal chambers of Vautrin's psyche find no equivalent in Vidocq's checkered career, unless the doubtful assumption is made that Balzac could have been induced to believe the extravagant inventions of Vidocq's editors. Vautrin, by contrast to Vidocq, was not merely a criminal but the very embodiment of crime and an articulate enemy of law and society. Marceau accounts for the darkening of Vautrin's personality by the ingenious suggestion that the character is based not only upon Vidocq but also upon the imposter and burglar Pierre Coignard, whose apprehension, as noted earlier, was one of the peaks of Vidocq's career at the Sûreté.²² Just as Coignard grounded his false aristocratic title on his seizure of papers of the Comte de St.-Hélène Pontis, the fictional Vautrin murders the King of Spain's secret agent Abbé Carlos Herrera and steals his identity.
   ot only does Vidocq await us in the pages of Balzac, we may even make his acquaintance on Broadway. The scene is well-known to theatergoers. A heavily laden cart overturns pinning a man beneath a wheel. Onlookers are in despair but are unable to help, until a powerful man arrives and lifts the cart from the trapped man's body. This dramatic highlight of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables is in fact a faithful rendering of an event from the life of François Vidocq. The accident occurred in 1828; the cart was carrying paper and cardboard from Vidocq's paper factory outside Paris, and the man he rescued was one of his employees, an ex-convict. Like Jean Valjean in the guise of Father Madeleine, Vidocq undertook his manufacturing business with the philanthropic objective of giving jobs to the disadvantaged.
     Vidocq was a friend of Victor Hugo and rendered him valuable services as a private detective at two important junctures in the author's complicated love life.²³ In addition to his rescue of the injured carter, Jean Valjean shared many experiences with Vidocq, among them his original sentence for a minor crime inspired by the basic human need for bread, and the relentless pursuit of the police even after Valjean had long acquitted his debt to society. Victor Hugo's powerful phrase applies equally to his fictional hero and to his friend Vidocq: both men, after suffering 

retribution meted out by the criminal justice system, were "punished by life."²⁴

     Given the strong preoccupation of Honore Daumier with images of fraud and social corruption, his attraction to the career of Vidocq was inevitable. For Le Père Goriot in the collected works of Balzac published in Paris between 1843 and 1848, Daumier contributed an hors-texte wood engraving of Vidocq's alter ego Vautrin, a shadowy, tight-lipped personage in black top hat and cutaway.
     A more direct portrayal of the real-life Vidocq in Daumier's work seems to have been overlooked. In the engraving series devoted to the protean swindler Robert Macaire, which appeared in Le Charivari from 1836 and 1838, one caricature quite clearly lampoons Vidocq in his role as private detective.²⁵ Macaire, leaning back in his armchair, confidently faces a bonneted female client of his Inquiries Office (Bureau des Renseignements), whose name is borrowed from Vidocq's agency. The distressed lady tells Macaire: "Monsieur, a 100 franc banknote has been stolen from me." The detective replies: "Very well, Madame. I have your case in hand; the thief is one of my friends." The client, plucking up her courage, then inquires: "Could I have my banknote back and know who took it from me?" Macaire-Vidocq advises her without flinching that the cost of his service will exceed the recovery: "Nothing is easier. Give me 1500 francs for my services; tomorrow the thief will return the banknote to you and give you his card."
     In the background of the inquiries agent's office, Daumier labels three rows of file drawers with references to various categories of criminals and their specialties. Two of the dossier labels are self-explanatory: "prison-camp escapees" and "petty thieves". The other three, however, refer to certain nineteenth-century theft and fraud devices that can now be elucidated only by consulting dictionaries of underworld argot. The first category, vol au pot (potted theft) is "an American style of theft where the crook persuades his dupe to accompany him on an amorous outing but first convinces him to hide his money in a hole from which a confederate removes it."²⁶ The bonjouriens ("good-morning" men), whose depredations are recorded in another file, specialize in "a theft committed, without a break-in, in an unlocked apartment. The thief, if he comes upon his victim, pretends having made a mistake for which he 

apologizes with a little "Bonjour!"²⁷ The final drawer, marked vol a la graisse (theft by alteration), documents thefts involving the substitution of an object without value for a valuable object (e.g., copper for gold) by a criminal using chemical procedures.²⁸

* This article was previously published as Kent State University Libraries and Media Services, Department of Special Collections and Archives, Occasional papers, 3rd series, no. 4 (Kent, Ohio, 1997)

* This article was previously published by Kent State University Libraries and Media Services,Department of Special Collections and Archives, Occasional Papers, 3rd series, no. 4 (Kent, Ohio, 1997)

1. Jean Savant, LE VRAI VIDOCQ 248 (Paris 1957).

2. Jean Savant (ed.), LES VRAIS MEMOIRES DE VIDOCQ 45 (Paris: Correa, 1950) (hereinafter Les Vrais Memoires de Vidocq).

3. Philip John Stead, VIDOCQ: A BIOGRAPHY 15 (New York: Staples Press, 1953).

4. Les Vrais Memoires de Vidocq, at 202.

5. Jean Savant (ed.), LE PROCES DE VIDOCQ (Paris 1956).

6. I will, later in the essay, comment on Vidocq's Memoirs of 1828.

7. Andre Roches (ed.), ENCYCLOPEDIE NATIONALE DE LA POLICE 363 (Paris: Ministere de L'Interieur et du Ministere de la Defense Nationale, 1955).

8. Les Vrais Memoires de Vidocq, at 296-97, n. 156.

9. Savant, Le Vrai Vidocq, at 63.

10. See Les Vrais Memoires de Vidocq.

11. Edgar Allan Poe, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," in the 1 COMPLETE POEMS AND STORIES OF EDGAR ALLAN POE 326 (New York: A. Knopf, First Borzoi ed., 1951)(2 vols.)

12. Charles Higham, THE ADVENTURES OF CONAN DOYLE: THE LIFE OF THE CREATOR OF SHERLOCK HOLMES 44 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976).

13. Pierre Nordon, CONAN DOYLE: A BIOGRAPHY 225-226 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967). See also E. F. Bleiler, "Introduction to Emile Gaboriau," in Emile Gaboriau, MONSIEUR LECOQ (New York: Dover Publications, 1975).

14. Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet," in THE COMPLETE SHERLOCK HOLMES 15 (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1938).

15. Stead, Vidocq, at 207.

16. Winton Tolles, TOM TAYLOR AND THE VICTORIAN DRAMA 197, n. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).

17. Paul Gayot, "Lupin premier," in Europe nos. 604-05 (August-September 1979), at 21.

18. Stead, Vidocq, at 147.

19. Id. at 147-50.

20. Savant, Le Vrai Vidocq, at 12.

21. Felicien Marceau, BALZAC AND HIS WORLD 290 (New York: Orion Press, 1966)(trans. Derek Coltman).

22. Marceau, Balzac and His World, at 291.

23. Savant, Le Vrai Vidocq, at 202.

24. Vidocq also inspired the underworld background of Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris as well as police characters in several novels of Alexandre Dumas pere. See Savant, Le Vrai Vidocq, at 201-02.

25. Honore Daumier, Financial and Businessmen (Robert Macaire). Preface, catalogue and notes by Jean Adhemar (Paris 1974), print 37, originally published in Le Charivari (November 6, 1836).

26. Gaston Esnault, DICTIONNAIRE HISTORIQUE DES ARGOTS FRANCAIS 515 (Paris 1965).

27. Id. at 74.

28. Id. at 146.