Vidocq was no doubt the father of the now famous French detective police, and its unsavory origin has been often quoted against it. The authorities themselves were ashamed of using such means for the repression of crime, and after ten or a dozen years Vidocq was dismissed from his employment, only to resume it, after the Revolution of 1830, in a private and unofficial character, secretly approved of by the authorities. He still hoped to return to the Préfecture, and sought to bring it about by proving his value. One of his agents concerted with several old convicts to carry out a burglary in a rich man’s house. Vidocq was able to give early information, and the police were in a position to capture the burglars in the act. Such an arrest brought much credit to Vidocq, who was reinstated in his old office. But the thieves were in due course arraigned for trial, and one of them informed against Vidocq’s agent, as having suggested the crime. The judge ordered the arrest of the agent. Vidocq reported that he had left Paris, and was not to be found. Again the thieves accused. The judge now learned that the agent was actually employed under Vidocq, and the agent was then taken, tried and sentenced. Vidocq was again discredited, and the detective office or bureau, now known as the “Police de la Sûreté,” was re-organised on a new and perfectly straightforward basis.
The character of Vidocq looms large in the annals of French crime. His was a strange personality, and he did some wonderful, although unworthy, not to say infamous, things. A good picture of him is preserved by M. Moreau Christophe, long Inspector General of French prisons. Vidocq, he tells us, was gifted with extraordinary audacity. His courage was almost unexampled. He had an amazing fertility of resource, and was endowed with remarkable physical strength. He belonged in turn to the two extremes of society. He might late in life be called an honest man, but he certainly had been a thief. His nature was strangely contradictory and had two sides, both in manners and in conduct. He was garrulous yet discreet; always a boaster, yet cunning and secretive. Although prompt to execute, he was much given to thought before action; when he seemed to make a chance stroke it was the result of careful previous calculation. His appearance was peculiar. Of middle height, but built like a small Hercules, he had a large head, carried on a short, sinewy neck. His yellow hair was thick and close grown; he had a flat nose, open nostrils and a large humorous mouth, fleshy cheeks with salient cheek-bones, small, piercing green eyes, which glittered under prominent thick eyebrows. A phrenologist was called in to examine his head without knowing his name, and reported on his cranium as combining three types: “that of a liar, a diplomatist and a sister of charity.” To this M. Moreau Christophe adds the suggestion that he would have been better described as “an ape, a fox and an old humbug.”