5/17/2023 0 Comments Les memoires de vidocq![]() ![]() Alone and suddenly penniless, he joined a troupe of traveling entertainers and for a time posed as a Caribbean cannibal who ate raw meat, before aligning himself briefly with a group of puppeteers, before they kicked him out. He ran away, intending to make his way to North America, but he was robbed himself. He spent a short time in jail, at his father’s insistence.Īt fourteen, he stole from his parents again, this time scoring a large amount of cash from his parent’s bakery. At thirteen, he was arrested for the first time, for stealing some silver plates from his parents and selling them. He was born in July 1775, the third child of Henriette Françoise Vidocq and Nicolas Joseph François Vidocq, a baker in Arras, a town in northern France. Along the way, he also allegedly worked as a schoolteacher, though that ended when he was run out of town for dallying with some of his older female students. He became a master of disguise, on at least one occasion fleeing the law disguised as a nun. He was a card sharp and conman, lived under other identities for years, and romanced widows and actresses. He was also a scoundrel and a thief, a liar and cheat, an active soldier and a military deserter, in and out of prison constantly, charged with everything from disturbing the peace to forging public documents, and sentenced at different times to the galleys and the gallows. His life does seem to have been pretty flamboyant, that’s for sure.īut Vidocq was no angel. He’s primarily known as the founder and chief of one of the world’s first plainclothes police forces, and his clever use of disguise and surveillance to capture some of France’s most infamous and deadly criminals. Like Allan Pinkerton, who followed in his footsteps, much of Vidocq’s legacy was based on his own not always accurate (or modest) memoirs. I say “maybe” because almost everything we know about Vidocq comes from Vidocq himself and other, often contradictory sources. He also killed his first man at fourteen, and once posed as a cannibal in a traveling show. EUGÈNE FRANÇOIS VIDOCQ was the world’s first private detective, as we generally understand the term. ![]()
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