James Morton - The First Detective: The Life and Revolutionary Times of Vidocq: Criminal, Spy and Private Eye

It is sometimes said that, in a competition for mendacity, Baron Munchausen could lie for Germany, Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, for England, Frank Harris for Ireland, Axel Munthe the author of The Story of San Michele for Sweden, Grey Owl (born Archibald Belaney and really from Hastings) for Canada, Aime Semple McPherson for America and Casanova for Italy. To that select list could be added, if only a trifle unfairly, Vidocq for France.

The former convict and police chief Eugne-Franois Vidocq, and his literary ghost, finished his memoirs in January 1828 when he was, as it were, between jobs. He had been sacked, or had resigned, as the Chief of Detectives in the Sret and was already actively lobbying for his return to power. He was also in the process of establishing a paper mill at Saint-Mand near the Bois de Vincennes where he proposed to employ former convict labor. However, he broke his arm in five places in a fall the following month; it was feared that he would lose the arm but in time the fractures healed. Vidocq then rather let things slip as far as his memoirs were concerned and it was not until after he had been to Dijon to obtain a copy of a pardon granted him back in 1818 absolving him of a crime committed during the French Revolution, that he looked up the printer to see the page proofs. He was not pleased with what he found, complaining that the Prefect of Police, Guy Delavau, and his henchman Franchet, had taken advantage of his absence to change the text for the worse.

So far as Vidocq who describes himself as a sort of Faublas, the hero of one of the many semi-pornographic novels of the period was concerned, the text had been completely altered and instead of:

the sallies, vivacity and energy of my character, another had been foisted in, totally deprived of all life, colouring or promptitude. With a few alternatives the facts were really the same; but all that was casual, involuntary and spontaneous in a turbulent career, was given as the long premeditation of evil intent.

The necessity that impelled me was altogether passed over; I was made the scoundrel of the age or rather a Compre Mathieu, without one redeeming point of sensitivity, conscience, remorse or repentance.

Vidocq may have been a great police officer, a talented swordsman, a prodigious womanizer, and a fine raconteur, but, certainly at that stage in his career if ever he was not a writer. He had set down his memoirs but, in an era when length was, if not all, then a great part of it, he had come up far too short. It put one in mind of Evelyn Waughs Decline and Fall, in which Paul Pennyfeather gives an award to a boy for writing the longest essay, regardless of its merit. The publisher wanted four volumes to make it worth his while. The trouble was that the public were champing at the bit and there was no way, even had he the ability, that Vidocq could bring himself to rewrite the first volume. He did, however, correct the second one and, so he said, from the point at which he joined the Corsairs at Boulogne the story was all his own. Vidocqs first ghostwriter was Emile Morice whom he sacked but, as so often happens, it was a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire. Louis-Franois LHritier de lAin, who was then employed, produced a further three volumes, padding things out with a version of his own, already published, novel. It is on those memoirs that Vidocq was judged for over a century. He was not helped in the least by LHritiers vitriolic supplement to the final volume. Nevertheless the Mmoires were an immediate success and were constantly reprinted.

One way of looking at Vidocq is to follow the approach to Casanovas memoirs to take them as invention unless and until it can be proved otherwise. Over the years, however, researchers into the life of the Venetian rake, notably J. Rives-Childs, have found that much of what he wrote was accurate. He had, it was true, muddled dates, and sometimes places and names had been changed or misremembered, but essentially large chunks could be proved.

The same is true with Vidocq, particularly in the tales of his early years. It was all a large romance written to sell copies to a gullible public. Again, this is a trifle unfair. Not all the hyperbole was Vidocqs. For example, in the English translation of 18289 an appendix had Vidocq imprisoned for debt as a result of his gambling and a fictitious son, Julius, who, after being in the galleys, was now employed in Vidocqs Saint-Mand paper mill; both stories simply added to spice up the text and neither of them true.

For years no attempt was made to separate the Vidocq of fact from the Vidocq of fiction the hero of the novel by Dick Donovan; of the play, VIDOCQ! The French Police Spy, staged in London in 1829, or the 1860 version of Vidocqs life at the Brittania Theatre, or the one which played in Paris in the early 1900s. Things changed in the 1950s with the work of the historian Jean Savant who produced an annotated edition of Vidocqs life and whose research was able to confirm Vidocqs own account of many of the events in his life, particularly the later ones. Savants incalculably valuable work does, however, come down very heavily in favor of Vidocq at almost every conceivable opportunity. A rather more inquiring note was struck by both Eric Perrin in his 1995 biography and Bruno Roy-Henry in his 2001 book. No one writing about Vidocq could be other than indebted to them and their researches. They have shown that much of what he and his ghosts wrote can now be proved to be correct.

Vidocq has been less fortunate with his English biographers, one of whom devotes only the final two pages of his book to the last thirty years of his life and manages, as has been pointed out, to make two glaring mistakes in those few hundred words. Philip Steads 1953 Vidocq: Picaroon of Crime is a book very much of its time when biographies included made-up conversations and contained neither annotations nor footnotes. It remains, nevertheless, a very readable account. In his 1977 account, The Vidocq Dossier (also unannotated), Samuel Edwards frankly admits that many of the books borrow from each other. I hope I have been able to add something to as well as borrowing from all these accounts and to place Vidocq more in the context of his times.