First Known Private Investigator - by Tom Turner

The first known private investigator was a French criminal by the name of Eugène François Vidocq. Vidocq was born in the northern French city of Arras on July 23, 1775 and was the son of a baker. At age 14, Vidocq accidentally killed a fencing instructor who had challenged the young man to a duel over a woman, and Vidocq stole money from his parent’s bakery with the intent of sailing to the Americas. But along the way he lost his money to a young actress and at age 15, joined the Bourbon Regiment, a company of battle-hardened ruffian soldiers. After serving only six months, he boasted to having fought in fifteen duels. His military record reflects a long list of reprimands, desertions and reenlistments according to a ghost-written biography.

Vidocq was in an out of jail through his mid twenties for offenses ranging from a card shark, forgery and as a pirate. At one point in his early life, he masqueraded as a nun and even taught school. That ended when he was run out of town after becoming a little too amorous with some of his older female students.

In the early 1800’s, Vidocq decided to try something more respectable. He approached the Paris police and offered his services as spy. With knowledge of his colorful past, M. Henry, the head of the criminal department of the gendarmerie decided to take a chance on Vidocq. He worked as an undercover informant for the police as an inmate within a Paris prison. Proving his skills, officials orchestrated his escape.

By 1812, he had created the security department within the police called Sûreté, which served as the criminal investigative unit of the Paris police and was later the inspiration for Scotland Yard and the FBI. By 1820, his thirty man unit, many of which were ex-cons, had blossomed into a team of experts that had decreased the crime rate in Paris by 40% and were responsible for more than 800 arrests.

Vidocq is remembered because he introduced record-keeping and ballistics to criminal investigation and made the first plaster casts of shoe impressions. He is credited with creating indelible ink and unalterable bond paper. Vidocq was credit with conducting the first sting operations, plainclothes police work and crime scene preservation. Some of his concepts are still in use today by French police.

Growing bored once again, in 1833, Eugène François Vidocq established the first known private detective agency known as Le Bureau Des Renseignments (Office of Intelligence), again hiring ex-cons. Law enforcement was not impressed with Vidocq’s latest venture and tried many times to shut him down. In 1842, he was arrested on suspicion of unlawful imprisonment, taking money under false pretenses, corrupting public officials, and usurping police functions after he had solved an embezzling case. He was sentenced to five years imprisonment and fined 3,000 francs. Later suspecting that he had been set up, the Court of Appeals released him.

During his later years, he wrote novels based on his criminal experiences. In 1946, there was a film based on Vidocq’s memoirs titled, “A Scandal in Paris”.
When his wife died in September, 1847, he retired and closed his agency. In April 1857, Vidocq became paralyzed in his home in the Marais district in Paris and died on May 11.