10 Brilliant Details Surrounding Alphonse Bertillon, The French Detective Who Changed The Way Policeman Solve Crime

6 /10 L'Affaire

Bertillon was one of the many legal experts who observed and participated in the Dreyfus Affair, which became a massive scandal of French legal undertaking and the extreme inequalities at work within their native system at the time.

He was called in as a handwriting expert to examine an incriminating document known as the “bordereau.”

Bertillon implemented his system of measurements to prove somehow that he forged the letter, but in the manner of someone developing his handwriting.

5 /10 Devil's Island

Despite Bertillon’s best efforts and having no background in handwriting analysis, he put forward his theories to the court-martial committee, who eventually agreed with him – until the decision was overturned, thus prompting the entire affair to be marked as a legal scandal of the highest degree.

Bertillon insisted that his system was based on mathematics and algebra and had no flaws beyond its moment-to-moment implementation, but several renowned mathematicians, including Jules Henri Poincare, disagreed.

4 /10 Saturnine Magnetism

Alphonse was known as something of an eccentric, even going back to his days as a conscript. During the Dreyfus affair, he was not the legal professional that the rest of the assembly expected.

He was rambling, meandering, not quite in complete control of himself. His argument itself was described as a “long tissue of absurdities.”

It was described in many ways as a passive and deep personality, much to the point that Maurice Paleologue described being around Alphonse as if “being in the presence of a necromancer.”

3 /10 Standardization Of The Bertillon System

Despite his social shortcomings, Bertillon’s system became more popular and effective overseas.

It was used in American states to correctly catalog and identify criminals during the tail end of the Western Expansion era.

This proved invaluable to law enforcement who were overrun with all types of crime, but it also exposed one of the system’s underthought flaws: how it handled criminals who were not men of a certain height, build, proportion and race.

2 /10 Minneapolis Mamie

The first well-known implementation of the Bertillon system in America was in Minneapolis in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Black women would work as prostitutes, thus flaunting the law, and would be categorized and logged using the Bertillon system.

However, they could exploit flaws in the design, notably that the measurements taken didn’t account for the difference in female body types and relied on their real names.

Many sex workers, therefore, took the alias of “Mamie” after Mamie Knight – the only surviving mugshot of one such alley worker that the department had.

1 /10 Fact And Fiction

Bertillon died in 1914, shortly after writing an affirmation overusing fingerprints as part of his system, which would then go on to be implemented and standardized to even further success in the future.

Most of his system fell out of use, but mugshots remain one of the most reliable identifying tools for law enforcement.

Bertillon was famously referenced in Sherlock Holmes, where the eponymous detective was referred to as the “second highest expert in Europe” after Bertillon, to which Homles was inclined to agree.

His system was also combated by the fictional thief Arsene Lupin, who exploited its flaws to escape his capture, predicting the system’s general loss of favor over time.