November 20, 2023 • 39 mins
Bertillon developed a system of identification via body measurements that was designed to identify whether crime suspects had an existing criminal history. But his contributions to police work have been occluded by some terrible missteps.
Research:
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Alphonse Bertillon". Encyclopedia Britannica, 19 Apr. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alphonse-Bertillon
- “Identifying Prisoners.” St. Louis Globe-Democrat. December 16, 1886. https://www.newspapers.com/image/571277110/?terms=Alphonse%20Bertillion&match=1
- Gates, Kelly. “Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance.” NYU Press. 2011.
- Fornabai, Nanette L. “Criminal Factors: ‘Fantômas’, Anthropometrics, and the Numerical Fictions of Modern Criminal Identity.” Yale French Studies, no. 108, 2005, pp. 60–73. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/4149298
- Fosdick, Raymond B. “The Passing of the Bertillon System of Identification.” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology, vol. 6, no. 3, 1915, pp. 363–69. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1132744
- Hoobler, Thomas and Dorothy. “The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection.” Little, Brown, and Co. 2009.
- Levendowski, Amanda, “Face Surveillance Was Always Flawed.” Public Books. Nov. 30, 2021. https://www.publicbooks.org/face-surveillance-was-always-flawed/
- Mouat, F. J. “Notes on M. Bertillon’s Discourse on the Anthropometric Measurement of Criminals.” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 20, 1891, pp. 182–98. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2842237
- Wang, Hansi Lo. “Meet Alphonse Bertillon, The Man Behind The Modern Mug Shot.” NPR. March 8, 2016. https://www.npr.org/2016/03/08/469174753/meet-alphonse-bertillon-the-man-behind-the-modern-mug-shot
- Daniel V. The Social History of Disaster Victim Identification in the United States, 1865 to 1950. Acad Forensic Pathol. 2020 Mar;10(1):4-15. doi: 10.1177/1925362120941336
- Helfand, Jessica. “Alphonse Bertillon and the Troubling Pursuit of Human Metrics.” The MIT Press Reader. May 5. 2021. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-troubling-pursuit-of-human-metrics/
- “Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914).” National Library of Medicine. Visible Proofs: Forensic Views of the Body. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/visibleproofs/galleries/biographies/bertillon.html
- Farebrother, R. and Champkin, J. (2014), Alphonse Bertillon and the measure of man: More expert than Sherlock Holmes. Significance, 11: 36-39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2014.00739.x
- Guthrie, Glenice J., and Sharon Jenkins. “Bertillon Files: An Untapped Source of Nineteenth-Century Human Height Data.” Journal of Anthropological Research, vol. 61, no. 2, 2005, pp. 201–15. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3630855
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We mentioned quite recently
that an al fALS Bertion episode was coming, and in
a shocking turn of events, here it is with very
(00:24):
little delay. Yes, unlike so often when it's like four
years later. If you have noticed that there is also
a Bertillon episode in the archives, yes, that's true. This
one is not exactly an update. It's got a much
different focus than that one that talks a lot about
his police work and some of the ways he innovated,
(00:44):
which we don't talk about much in this one beyond
some of the key elements of the Bertillon system. But
I really wanted to look at his life story a
little bit more and who he was as a person.
So that's why we are revisiting alfals Bertion. Bertil is
a man who definitely is a mix of really positive
achievements and traits and also a whole lot of really
(01:07):
problematic issues. He's a very complex human. Bertil developed a
system of identification via body measurements that was designed to
identify whether crime suspects had an existing criminal history. It's
just worked sort of. But his contributions to police work
have kind of been occluded by some terrible missteps he
(01:28):
made in his career after that. I'm just going to
tell you upfront, this is one of those episodes where
there are a lot of parentheticals where we just have
to point out that there is a threat of racism
through his entire story. I don't want to detract from
it by jokingly saying you're going to get a lot
of this, but just brace for it. It's one of
(01:49):
those things we're just acknowledging because in a lot of
cases it doesn't do any good to really dig into
it and go, here's how this was racist. One thing,
the very title of it, you will know is super racist.
So know that going in as we examine Alfonse Bertillon.
Alphonse Bertillon was born April twenty third, eighteen fifty three
(02:10):
in Paris, France, and he came from a family of innovators.
His grandfather, Jean Baptiste Bertignon, served in the military under
Napoleon Bonaparte before becoming a chemist. In that role, he
made improvements to the distillation process and invented a sugar
purification method. Jean Baptiste also invested in one of the
(02:31):
first gas works in Paris, helping to usher in the
age of the literal city of lights. Alphonse's father, Louisdolphe Bertillon,
studied medicine at the Sorbonne, although his true passion was engineering,
and he sort of combined the two when he realized
he could measure humans and used that data to compile
(02:52):
statistical tables. Some of these tables were inherently racist. Ui
Adolf eventually became France's head of vital statistics, and Alphonse's brother,
Jacques Bertignon followed their father in that role. Alphonse's mother
was Zoe Guiller Bertillon, who had married Louis Adolf in
(03:14):
eighteen fifty. According to a biography written in the nineteen fifties,
Zoe had wanted to name their second son Alfred, but
Louis Adolf had forgotten the name they had chosen when
he went to register the birth and so incorrectly went
with Alphonse. That is really quite a charming story in
(03:34):
that biography, where she's just like okay, fine, like they're
just really happy about their new baby, who apparently screamed
a lot. When Alfonse was just a few months old,
the Bertillons moved away from Paris to Molmoor and See,
about ten miles or seventeen kilometers north, and this move
was precipitated by a growing distrust of the science community
(03:56):
in Paris at the time, as scientific discoveries move the
populace forward to people behind them were sometimes seen as
causing unrest. Uh but this move was very good for
the family for other reasons because being in the country
seemed to help Alfonse, who had been kind of sickly
from the time he was born, gain a degree of
health and level out a little bit in terms of
(04:18):
his child development. The family stayed at Monmorency for three years,
and they moved back to Paris in eighteen fifty six,
settling in on the Rue de Bruze. Alphonse sounds like
a scamp as a kid. He was a curious child,
but not really interested in structured learning. When he struggled
in school, his parents hired a tutor for him, but
(04:40):
he was pretty merciless with this tutor would hide his
glasses and play tricks on him. Because he had been
sickly as a small child and still had some health issues.
He was entirely willing to exploit that to just get
out of work. When Alphonse was eleven, he was sent
to a boarding school that special in difficult students. He
(05:02):
was there for a semester before the Bertignon family received
a letter that basically said no amount of money was
worth dealing with Alphonse. As a scholar, he excelled in
botany and natural history, but he just did not have
any interest in other subjects. At the same time, the
family was trying to decide what to do with their
(05:23):
precocious thirteen year old Zoe Bertillon became gravely ill. Her
exact illness is unknown. It's been theorized that she may
have had some sort of bacterial infection that led to sepsis. Alfons,
his older brother Jacques, and their younger brother George attended
her deathbed, and Alfonse is said to have fainted in
the moment that she died. As the family was mourning,
(05:45):
Luis Adolf had taken the two younger boys to Orno
la cousadle Bach, near France's border with Andorra. It was
a place that he and Zoe had spent time when
they were first married, and there Alphonse got some tutoring
from his father, who realized that his mental child mostly
just needed to be challenged by education to engage with it.
(06:07):
This is something, of course, that is recognized as part
of a person's learning profile now, but in the mid
nineteenth century it was often mischaracterized as laziness or a
lack of focus. I think folks still struggle with being
branded lazy when that's not really what's going on today.
But to be clear, Alphonse was stubborn about the whole
(06:29):
idea of studying things he did not have a natural
interest in, and this recognition of Alphonse's need for stimulus
did not result in him becoming a good student or
having courses tailored to him. Perhaps more than anything else, though,
this period brought Alphonse and his father much closer. Before
her death, Zoe had been the parent that Alphonse had
(06:51):
been close to. But Alfos did have to go back
to school, and he was eventually enrolled at the Imperial
Lise at Versailles. This initially seemed like it might be
a good fit, but all of the same problems arose
once the newness of that situation had worn off. He
not only didn't work on his studies, he actively worked
(07:13):
with some of his friends to disrupt class. Eventually, the
Imperial Lise sent Louis d'lfberthion a letter very similar to
the one that he had received from the previous school.
They had been able to deal with his behavior until
an incident in which Alfonse, who this sounds wild to me,
had been secretly making hot chocolate in his desk with
(07:34):
the spirit lamp for himself and his friends started a fire.
But then, when he was confronted about it with literal
smoke coming out of his desk, instead of opening the
desk and revealing what had gone on, he hit his
teacher over the head with a book that ended his
formal education. But this happened just as the Frank Oppression
(07:55):
War began, so it's also possible his education would have
been put on hold then. Anyway, he managed, how it
is unclear, to take and pass the baccalaureate examination in
science and Literature on his own a couple of years later,
at the age of twenty. Alphonse wanted to sort of
bask in that accomplishment, but his father wanted him to
(08:18):
get a job, so much so that Luis Adolf found
one for him as a junior bank clerk. This went
about as well as you might think young person being
pushed into a job by their parent. It's unclear exactly
how this posting ended for Alphonse. It was a short
lived situation, though. Next Alfonse was sent to England with
(08:42):
the hope that some time abroad would mature him, and
he found London to be a bit alienating. He noticed
immediately that people stared at him just when he was
walking around, and one of his friends, who was also
French but living in London, explained that it was because
he dressed like a Parisian and that set him apart
from the rest of London. He wanted to revamp his
(09:02):
wardrobe to try to blend in better, but Louis Adolph
refused to send him money for that, so the normally
pretty aimless Adolf Bertillon suddenly was hunting for jobs, and
he landed a position teaching French for very low pay
at a collegiate school. This was really challenging because he
didn't really speak English much at all at this point,
(09:23):
but he did manage. He next moved to a position
as a private tutor, and he started to suggest to
his family that maybe after he was done in London.
He would go to university in England or in Scotland,
but his father did not want to spend the money
to enroll him in a university given his education history.
Al Fose moved on to another job, teaching French and
(09:45):
London until he was recalled to his home country for
military service in the ongoing Francoprussian War. In eighteen seventy five.
He became part of one hundred and thirty ninth Regiment
stationed in Rome, which is right in between Vichy and Lyon.
He was moved at some point from an infantry to
a clerical role, and also decided that when he was
(10:07):
done he would go to medical school, so he started
to use this downtime in the service to study medical texts.
He became fascinated specifically with the skeleton. In a biography
in the nineteen fifty six, author Henry T. F. Rhodes
states that even at this early point, Bertillon was quote
devoted to and almost obsessed with a specialized problem. This
(10:30):
was the dimensions of the human skeleton. That fascination with
the human skeleton would feed into the way that Bertion
eventually made a name for himself. But before we get
to that we'll pause for a sponsor break. After his
(10:53):
military service, Berthion returned to Paris, and while deciding what
his next move would be. Because it turned out he
didn't end up wanting to go to medical school, he
got typhoid fever and that delayed any plans that he
may have had in mind. But he may have also
been starting to panic a little at how far behind
his brothers and friends he was in terms of a career,
(11:14):
so he asked his father to help him again. Al
Foals was able to get a job working for the
police department of Paris as a records clerk with the
help of his father. He started in that job on
March fifteenth of eighteen seventy nine, and the twenty five
year old Bertien found that he had walked into a
mess of disorganized records. One of the biggest problems is
(11:38):
hard to imagine happening today. Police in France and a
lot of other parts in the world had a hard
time knowing if somebody who was brought in on an
arrest or even sentenced to jail time, had a prior
criminal record. There were forms that were filled out every time,
but a combination of corruption sloppy practices and lying on
(11:59):
the part of detainee meant that those forms were largely meaningless.
A lot of this just wound up coming down to
whether a police officer remembered a suspect from a previous offense.
Adding to that, everybody seemed to include their own set
of information on any intake documents, and there wasn't a
set list of criteria that was supposed to be used.
(12:21):
Before the eighteen thirties, that had been standard practice in
France to brand criminals, so it was easy to see
if somebody had been arrested before that was finally recognized
as inhumane and stopped, and nothing had really been developed
to identify repeat offenders in place of this branding, and
(12:46):
so this is, you know, forty some years later, that
they're still having all of these problems. After the branding
was outlawed, thank goodness and al false, Bercielle decided that
he would just restructure the whole system, and on October first,
eighteen seventy nine, exactly two hundred days from the day
he began the job, Bertion submitted a report to his boss,
(13:07):
Monsieur Antrieu, the Prefect of Police. This was a preliminary
version of the system that he would eventually develop, but
he had devised a way to uniquely identify people in
a large group through a systematic series of measurements of
their bodies. Bertillon had figured out a way to plug
those measurements into formulas that could sort people into various
(13:28):
groupings of similarities and then make that data accessible and
searchable in a way that a person could process a
newly arrested suspect and then check pretty easily to see
if that person had a prior record. For a very
simplified example, Bertillon had made an initial sorting of all
the records by head measurements, so you would need to
(13:48):
measure the person in question and then see if you
needed to look in the cards that were small, medium,
or large, and so that already eliminated two thirds of
the possible options. The remaining one third would then be
separated in a similar way by the next measurement, and
so on and then so on again, so you might
(14:10):
arrive at kind of a subdivision of people who had
the same forearm length from elbowcrease to wrist, all grouped together.
There would be a card for each of those people
in a set that match those measurements, and a police
officer would use that measurement to find the card set
and then sift through just a couple a dozen cards,
not all the cards, to see if the same suspect
(14:32):
had been previously booked or incarcerated. I feel like this
is sort of a dichotomous key for humans. If anybody
remembers that from like biology class, additional measurements could be
searched the same way to cross reference and verify the
identity of the person at hand. The entire system was
(14:53):
predicated on Bertillon's realization that no two people would have
all identical measurements. Uh. I will say this sounds maybe fiddley,
but it sounded completely cocka mamy to Prefect Andreelle. Also
that no two people having all identical measurements did come
back to bite him. We'll get to that. Bercion was
(15:15):
really disappointed that his superior did not see the functionality
of this system, so he decided he would further refine
it over the next six weeks, and then he submitted
an updated version of the report, hoping that this time
it would convince Andreau of its value. This time, he
was told very clearly the police had an established record
(15:35):
keeping method and it was fine. And in response, Alfonse
Bertillon told his superior that the system was actually a
mess and of little practical use. It probably went over
really well, but because he was a new clerk who
had no prior experience in the field, he was told
to simply drop it. And because his father had been
the one to get him that job, Louis Adolph Bertillon
(15:58):
got another letter about his son, this one suggesting not
that he was unfocused or high spirited like the ones
he had received when Alfonse was in school. This one
suggested pretty bluntly and kind of grossly that there might
be something actually wrong with Alphonse, mentally like maybe your
kids should get treatment. But once Alfalse showed his father
(16:20):
what he had been working on, the Elder Bertion totally
understood it, and he had some insights into why other
people might not. Initially, this combination of statistics with physiological
analysis had never been used in quite this way. It
was complex, but it did really make it possible to
find existing information about a person if they were in
(16:40):
the records, and to build up his database of cards,
which got pretty large. Bertion had visited prisons and took
measurements of inmates as well as taking the measure of family,
friends and associates, so he had a pretty big data
set that he could show, hey, look this works. This
use of anthropometry not just the measuring of the human
(17:00):
but the study of those measurements was not a new concept.
It's still used for a variety of applications today. It
is a study that has a lot of problematic issues
in its history because often the data collected had been
used to try to make connections about race and behavior.
The pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy are based on it,
(17:24):
and there have been many, many, many anthropologists over the
years who have announced incorrect, generalized conclusions about groups of
people using anthropometry as their evidence. Today this is mostly
used for things like designing seats for cars and airplanes,
for things like clothing size for manufacture. But in the
(17:44):
eighteen eighties, Bertanil was not trying to use interpretive analysis
to suggest that people with measurement X were more likely
to commit a certain type of crime, although the system
did get used that way by some police departments. We
have talked about that on the show recently. He was
just trying to show that no, two people would have
(18:04):
the exact same data set, and that if you set
up a system correctly, you could use their unique profile
to search for them in a big system. This also
has some problems to talk about in a bit. They're
different problems though than trying to say that you can
tell whether somebody is a criminal by what their head is,
Like yeah, and he even said as much in an
(18:26):
interview with prior podcast subject Ida Tarbell at one point
like no, no, no, that's not what this is for.
You cannot make the connection that like a man with
blue eyes will do X, Y or z, Like this
is literally just to find people, although he was also
aware that people were going to make those jumps, and
although Alphos's organizational system was not getting any recognition at work,
(18:47):
with his father's encouragement, he continued to refine it on
his own time. He had a growing collection of measuring tools,
and he made continuously updated records of himself and other volunteers.
The list of measurements eventually included the length and width
of the head, the length of the middle finger, the
length of the left foot, and the length of the
(19:07):
forearm from elbow to the end of the middle finger.
There were also notes recorded of body shape, any scars, tattoos,
or other unique identifiers, eye color, hair color, and it's
listed as like hair quality. It sort of comes down
to like hair texture and like is it thick, is
it thin? Is it curly? Is it not. He also
(19:28):
included a fairly new technology, which was photography. We've talked
about the history of photography many times on the show before,
so this is not really new information. The de geratype
was introduced in eighteen thirty nine, four decades before this
work by Bertillon, and in those four decades it had
progressed considerably. It still was pretty new though. The first
(19:50):
mass market camera was still about ten years away, and
there was already photography in use in police precincts, but
it wasn't really commonplace. Bertil felt that his measurement system
would be even more useful if he could attach standardized
photos to the records. He established measured distances from the
(20:11):
chair that the subject was seated into the camera, and
the full front and full side angles they would be
photographed from. This system, known as portrait parlai, is considered
the invention of the mug shot. If you've ever seen
old mugshots, from Europe in particular, in which there were
what looked like rulers and calipers and things like that
(20:31):
to position the subject's head. That's because they're using the
bertail age system, or a variation of it. He had,
in the meantime, not for this work, gotten a promotion
from being a junior clerk, but he was still kind
of used as a pain in the neck and an
outsider within his department. He did his job and was
apparently pretty good in terms of work ethic, but he
(20:54):
did not really make any friends at the police department.
But he was befriended by a young woman by chance.
When crossing the street one day, she asked him if
he would help her cross because she was nearsighted and
she was afraid of traffic, and he obliged, and once
they had crossed, they introduced themselves to one another. Her
(21:15):
name was Amelie Otar and she had recently moved to
Paris from Austria. When she mentioned she earned a living
giving German lessons, al Fall said he had always wanted
to learn German. That was a complete lie. He hated
that subject in school. As he was feeling stagnant in
his job. Bertillon wrote a book to occupy himself during
(21:37):
his time, and this book was titled Le Ras sauvage
or The Savage Races. Holly didn't find a lot of
information on this book's specific contents, but it's usually dismissed
as a messy, poorly researched title that was more of
Bertillon's musing on things he didn't have a lot of
exposure to than on any kind of actual scientific exam
(22:00):
of anything. Also, based on its title, seems like it
must have been incredibly racist. This book did not do well,
but he had dictated it to Amalie and the two
of them had become very close, and soon she was
taking notes for him regularly. I did find, i should say,
French language versions of it, and my French is okay,
(22:21):
but not really good enough to plow through a book
of pseudo information of me, like fake scientific search. So
just if anybody's like I found this book, well yeah,
but not an English language version for good reason, I imagine.
Not long though after the publication of this book, his
boss Andreau retired and the new prefect, whose name was Cemcas,
(22:46):
had heard of Bertion's project, and unlike his predecessor, he
was really interested in it, and he gave Bertillon a
chance to prove that this system would work. He had
three months to do it, with the help of two
assigned clerks, and he had to find at least one
repeat offender in the system through his method. It took
some time, but eventually he did manage to match a
(23:07):
newly arrested man with a previous visit to the Paris
police department. The timing of that first match in February
eighteen eighty three, was unfortunately overshadowed by the death of
Alfonse's father, Luis Adolph. Despite that loss, eighteen eighty three
was pivotal for Bertillon in more positive ways. He built
on that first success by identifying more and more recidivists
(23:30):
in the police records, and he proposed to and married Amili,
who had been an important part of his efforts. She's
said to have compiled more than seven thousand of the
cards used for this system. She had, by all accounts, beautiful,
easily legible writing, so she really made the whole system
easier for users. By the end of eighteen eighty three,
(23:51):
Bertillon had identified forty nine duplicate offenders in the Parisian
police bureau records. By the end of eighteen eighty Fourertion's
process had identified two hundred and forty one repeat offenders.
This was all proof enough for his prefect to start
instituting the system officially. Bertion was tasked with getting a
(24:11):
department up and running, and police staff from other countries
soon were visiting Paris to learn this system and bring
it back to their own offices, and Bertion had some
very high profile successes. His system was used to identify
an anarchist who was plotting a bombing, as well as
a man who had faked his own death and then
continued to commit crimes. An eighteen eighty six article ran
(24:35):
in papers around the US titled identifying Prisoners, and it
announced the new system as a triumph. It read, in
part quote, the latest method of identifying prisoners which has
been introduced into France by Monsieur Alfonse Bertian, and which
is now successfully practiced not only in the chief French prisons,
(24:55):
but in Russia and Japan. As well as the exact
measurement of the prisoner on his arrival at the jail,
a photograph is also immediately taken, and by these means
the many mistakes which have been made by a trusting
photographer only are avoided. In eighteen eighty eight, France had
established its Bureau of Identification, with Alphonse Bertillon as its director.
(25:17):
Bertion's career was clearly taking off, but his arrogance was
about to trip him up. We'll talk about his involvement
in the Dreyfus affair after we hear from the sponsors
that keep stuff you missed in history class going. As
(25:39):
use of bertillonage began to spread, there were naturally detractors.
One of the biggest early criticisms was simply disbelief that
there couldn't be duplicate people within the system. In a
statement in eighteen ninety three, Bertillon said, quote the ideal
card of the average man more exactly than Frances banand
that is to say, individual in whom all the measurements
(26:02):
correspond exactly to the average dimension, quite simply does not exist.
It is never found even in the most central section
of my cabinets. There are, of course, cards which approach
this ideal configuration, but the related measures never approached each
other so closely that they can be confused. That assertion
(26:23):
would be proven wrong. There were other issues with the system,
and we're going to get to them in a moment.
But here's the thing. Bertillon was stubborn when it came
to criticism. He was terrible at hearing anybody criticize his work,
and he always insisted that the critic was the one
in the wrong. Bertion's arrogance caused a great deal of
(26:44):
harm when he was asked to consult on the case
of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, which we've covered on the show
as a two parter the short version. Dreyfus was tried
for selling military secrets to Germany in eighteen ninety four.
A key piece of evidence in this trial was a
handwritten document which contained information about state secrets and their sale,
(27:08):
and Bertil was asked to analyze the handwriting. Now, he
was not a handwriting expert, but his reputation had become
so well known for his police work that people thought
he was the obvious choice. In the six years since
the Bureau of Identification had been formed, he had developed
other means of using his mathematical formulas to measure both
(27:29):
people in evidence, and he thought he could similarly use
it to analyze handwriting. And this was disastrous. Bertillon undoubtedly
biased by anti Semitism, which was an enormous problem in
France at the time, determined that Dreyfus, who was Jewish,
had forged his own handwriting in an effort to conceal
(27:52):
his involvement in this traitorous sale of state secrets. He
explained to the court at the trial that Dreyfus had
formed the letters using a square grid as the first
disguise passed, and then worked from that version to make
a bad copy of his own writing. Bertil may have
believed that he had figured out a criminal mastermind's method,
(28:17):
but what he really did was get a totally innocent
man exiled to Devil's Island and spark an enormous cultural
rift and giant anti Semitic backlash in France. But even
when new evidence came to light indicating that the real
trader was Ferdinand Walsen Esterhousi, including a confession, and not Dreyfus,
(28:41):
Bertillon continued to vehemently assert that Dreyfus had to be
the guilty party. His testimony during Dreyfus's second trial was
described this way by a member of the press. Quote
now and again, Monsieur Bertillon's voice rose in hateful shrieks.
There were interludes when he clenched his fist, struck the bar,
swearing that Dreyfus was the trader. The voice rang out
(29:05):
with passion and excitement. You beheld in him, the man
vain unto madness, with confidence in his atrocious fantasies. He
was at last taking his revenge for all the insults
of those who had called him a fit subject for
an asylum of the insane. Bertillon never conceded that he
had been wrong in this matter, even after real handwriting
(29:27):
experts had proven his conclusions and his methods false, and
he proclaimed this correctness even to his deathbed. While this
scandal caused them damage to his reputation as a handwriting expert,
and his work had contributed made in a major way
to a very real crisis, the family cost was greater.
(29:47):
Alphonse's brother, Jacques, also a well respected statistician, was married
to Polish physician Caroline Schultz. Caroline was Jewish, and Jacques
was so upset by Alpha Vonse Bertillon's insistence that Alfred
Dreyfuss must be guilty that these two brothers had a
massive falling out and they did not speak for years.
(30:08):
Over time, the bersionage method was recognized as having problems.
From the very beginning of it being put to practical
use in police departments around the world, its flaws became
more and more apparent. For one thing, there were a
lot of devices that needed to be acquired and then
maintained and constantly calibrated for measuring. For another, there was
(30:30):
significant training needed for implementation. Any clerk or officer who
was going to use those many devices and tools needed
fairly advanced instructions on how to use them, and different
users would often return different measurements of the same subject.
Sometimes the same user would return different measurements on the
same subject if they took a second set. Bertillon, as
(30:53):
he always did, denied all of this, stating that quote,
anyone who is not an imbecile could learn to measure
in five minutes and never forget the process. This system
also did not really account for things like the way
a person's body changes as it ages, so as a
subject aged, it was less and less likely that they
would match up with a Bertillon card from their younger years. Additionally,
(31:15):
incidents started to pop up where two different people were
identified as the same person, something that Bertillon had insisted
was not possible. By the end of the nineteenth century,
as finger printing started to be adopted by many law
enforcement offices, the Bertillon system, which had briefly been hailed
as a revolutionary tool, started to fall out of favor.
(31:37):
Did not take long after its introduction. Bertillon had initially
rallied against the use of fingerprints, although over time they
started to be included with Bertillon cards in police files.
The mug shot, however, with its standard front and profile
images that's endured despite the scandal of the Dreyfus affair.
Bertillon continued to be given awards for his work criminology,
(32:01):
and he continued in his work until in nineteen thirteen,
he began to experience the sensation of being extremely cold
at all times. He could not seem to get warm
no matter what amount of heat he was exposed to,
and he shivered constantly. He was also starting to have
trouble with his eyesight. After he was diagnosed with pernicious anemia.
(32:23):
His younger brother George, donated blood for a transfusion, and
initially this helped a great deal, but the effects wore
off and he needed a second and then a third transfusion,
and George was the donator on all of it, so
it was taking a toll on him as well. He
kept working for months as this was going on, and
there's no denying that he was getting weaker and weaker.
(32:45):
In early nineteen fourteen, he was nominated for the Legendarner
Officers Rosette, but people were reluctant to give him this
award unless he met one condition. An emissary was sent
to Bertillon's home, where at this point he was having
to stay in bed, and told him that he would
receive this award only if he retracted his assertion that
(33:07):
Dreyfus had written the document known as the Bordereaux, which
had been a key component of that case. Bertil reportedly
yelled no at the visitor repeatedly. That was the end
of that. On February thirteenth, nineteen fourteen, alse Bertigon fell
into a coma. He died at eleven PM and was
buried at Perlischez Cemetery. In the September nineteen fifteen edition
(33:31):
of the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law
and Criminology, lawyer and author Raymond B. Fosdick wrote quote
in the death of Alphonse Bertillon in February nineteen fourteen,
the anthropometric method of identification probably suffered its final blow.
For a decade, his prestigian personality were the only supports
of a system that in Europe at least, had been
(33:54):
fast losing ground. Persistently, even stubbornly, he endeavored to save
the method would was the product of his genius and
which bore his name, But he lived to see it
discarded in nearly every country in Europe except his own,
and even in France. Now that the weight of his
influence and his really compelling personality are gone, it is
(34:15):
doubtful whether his system of identification will be continued. One
of the issues that arises when looking at Bertillon's life
is that there are some big gaps in the information.
One cause was that his wife Emily and her grief
destroyed a lot of his papers after he died. As
a consequence, we really don't know a whole lot about
(34:35):
his personal thoughts on a lot of the events that
took place during his life. His actions and behaviors once
he started on the system that would be the basis
of his life's work show a man that was driven
by our pursuit of the truth, but also distracted from
that truth by Hubris. Perhaps the best summation of the
complicated Bertillon was written by Richard Fairbrother and Julian Champkin
(34:58):
in twenty fourteen for the periodical Significance, in which they
said he was quote passionate about measuring everything that could
be measured and some things that could not really be measured.
Besides ah false, Bertillon, you are a quandary. I will
(35:19):
talk so much about the various ways he has discussed
in our Behind the Scenes on Friday, but in the
meantime I want to talk to you about Stroganoff. This
is from our listener Chelsea, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I want to begin by thanking you both for such
a wonderful podcast. I've been a listener since the beginning,
(35:40):
and I have loved listening to the podcast mature and
grow over time with the two of you making it
your own. You've done such a phenomenal job of tackling
difficult and interesting topics, and I always can't wait to
hear what's next. This is a little late because I
listen exclusively when driving, so I'm always a bit behind sidebar.
You never have to apologize. We suffer the same problems
when we're going about our lives. We fall behind on
(36:02):
the things you love all the time. Chelsea continues, I
just listened to your Oops All Noodles episode, and I
was excited that you were covering beef stroganoff. My husband
and I have had a long standing disagreement about how
to make stroganoff, going back to the beginning of our marriage.
He does the majority of the cooking since he's better
at it, but stroganoff is something that I feel confident about.
The First time I made it, he couldn't believe I
(36:24):
was adding tomato paste and leaving out the mushrooms because
I don't like them. He thought that was absolutely ridiculous
because his recipe uses paprika instead. He claimed that adding
tomato paste and emitting mushrooms change the intent of the dish.
I said this was how I learned to make it,
and that I would stick with what I know. This
has become such an inside joke between us that now
(36:44):
years later, when we're meal planning for the week, if
stroganov is suggested, it becomes an entire family discussion about
are we making moms stroganof or Dad's strogan Off, complete
with a lot of knowing glances and the kids taking sides.
Imagine my delight when you said that tomato panes was
added as an ingredient in the early nineteen hundreds. It
was so great that I shouted ha while driving. I
(37:06):
was in the middle of dropping one kid at preschool
and driving to volunteer at the other kid's school, but
I had just enough time to swing by home and
interrupt my husband working in his home office with a
triumphant I was right. I love this so much. Once
he understood what I was talking about, he asked me
to cite my sources. He knew he couldn't argue with
(37:26):
me when I told him I heard it from you,
because he was the one who originally insisted I listened
to the podcast. He did want to make it known
that he was also right about the mushrooms. Thank you
for always adding knowledge and delight to my drive. I've
attached pictures of our dog, Carlton. He is twelve and
has always been a crabby old man dog who just
wants to lie in the sun or be under a
pile of blankets. Cheers, Chelsea. Okay, first, of all, Carlton
(37:49):
is hilarious and adorable. I love a grumpy dog there.
He's so cute. I want to scoop him up and
kiss him, and he'd be like, please do not. Yeah,
I mean that's the saying that I discovered too when
doing the Stroganoff research, is that there are a lot
of different versions because it propagated throughout the world and
at different regions that different people created their own kind.
(38:10):
So in my opinion, there's no wrong kind of stroken off. Ever.
I'm not a tomato paste person, but if you are
and you love that, awesome. I'm like heavy on the
sour cream and mushrooms person on that one. But I'm
just glad that everybody is cooking delicious things and that
it is something that they are good naturedly poking fun
(38:31):
at each other about, not an actual argument. If you
would like to write to us about the way you
make stroganoff, or any other dish or anything else we've
talked about on the show, you can do that at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find
us on social media as Missed in History, and if
you haven't yet subscribed, you can do that on the
iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
(38:58):
Stuff you missed in history class is a part reduction
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly
Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We mentioned quite recently
that an al fALS Bertion episode was coming, and in
a shocking turn of events, here it is with very
(00:24):
little delay. Yes, unlike so often when it's like four
years later. If you have noticed that there is also
a Bertillon episode in the archives, yes, that's true. This
one is not exactly an update. It's got a much
different focus than that one that talks a lot about
his police work and some of the ways he innovated,
(00:44):
which we don't talk about much in this one beyond
some of the key elements of the Bertillon system. But
I really wanted to look at his life story a
little bit more and who he was as a person.
So that's why we are revisiting alfals Bertion. Bertil is
a man who definitely is a mix of really positive
achievements and traits and also a whole lot of really
(01:07):
problematic issues. He's a very complex human. Bertil developed a
system of identification via body measurements that was designed to
identify whether crime suspects had an existing criminal history. It's
just worked sort of. But his contributions to police work
have kind of been occluded by some terrible missteps he
(01:28):
made in his career after that. I'm just going to
tell you upfront, this is one of those episodes where
there are a lot of parentheticals where we just have
to point out that there is a threat of racism
through his entire story. I don't want to detract from
it by jokingly saying you're going to get a lot
of this, but just brace for it. It's one of
(01:49):
those things we're just acknowledging because in a lot of
cases it doesn't do any good to really dig into
it and go, here's how this was racist. One thing,
the very title of it, you will know is super racist.
So know that going in as we examine Alfonse Bertillon.
Alphonse Bertillon was born April twenty third, eighteen fifty three
(02:10):
in Paris, France, and he came from a family of innovators.
His grandfather, Jean Baptiste Bertignon, served in the military under
Napoleon Bonaparte before becoming a chemist. In that role, he
made improvements to the distillation process and invented a sugar
purification method. Jean Baptiste also invested in one of the
(02:31):
first gas works in Paris, helping to usher in the
age of the literal city of lights. Alphonse's father, Louisdolphe Bertillon,
studied medicine at the Sorbonne, although his true passion was engineering,
and he sort of combined the two when he realized
he could measure humans and used that data to compile
(02:52):
statistical tables. Some of these tables were inherently racist. Ui
Adolf eventually became France's head of vital statistics, and Alphonse's brother,
Jacques Bertignon followed their father in that role. Alphonse's mother
was Zoe Guiller Bertillon, who had married Louis Adolf in
(03:14):
eighteen fifty. According to a biography written in the nineteen fifties,
Zoe had wanted to name their second son Alfred, but
Louis Adolf had forgotten the name they had chosen when
he went to register the birth and so incorrectly went
with Alphonse. That is really quite a charming story in
(03:34):
that biography, where she's just like okay, fine, like they're
just really happy about their new baby, who apparently screamed
a lot. When Alfonse was just a few months old,
the Bertillons moved away from Paris to Molmoor and See,
about ten miles or seventeen kilometers north, and this move
was precipitated by a growing distrust of the science community
(03:56):
in Paris at the time, as scientific discoveries move the
populace forward to people behind them were sometimes seen as
causing unrest. Uh but this move was very good for
the family for other reasons because being in the country
seemed to help Alfonse, who had been kind of sickly
from the time he was born, gain a degree of
health and level out a little bit in terms of
(04:18):
his child development. The family stayed at Monmorency for three years,
and they moved back to Paris in eighteen fifty six,
settling in on the Rue de Bruze. Alphonse sounds like
a scamp as a kid. He was a curious child,
but not really interested in structured learning. When he struggled
in school, his parents hired a tutor for him, but
(04:40):
he was pretty merciless with this tutor would hide his
glasses and play tricks on him. Because he had been
sickly as a small child and still had some health issues.
He was entirely willing to exploit that to just get
out of work. When Alphonse was eleven, he was sent
to a boarding school that special in difficult students. He
(05:02):
was there for a semester before the Bertignon family received
a letter that basically said no amount of money was
worth dealing with Alphonse. As a scholar, he excelled in
botany and natural history, but he just did not have
any interest in other subjects. At the same time, the
family was trying to decide what to do with their
(05:23):
precocious thirteen year old Zoe Bertillon became gravely ill. Her
exact illness is unknown. It's been theorized that she may
have had some sort of bacterial infection that led to sepsis. Alfons,
his older brother Jacques, and their younger brother George attended
her deathbed, and Alfonse is said to have fainted in
the moment that she died. As the family was mourning,
(05:45):
Luis Adolf had taken the two younger boys to Orno
la cousadle Bach, near France's border with Andorra. It was
a place that he and Zoe had spent time when
they were first married, and there Alphonse got some tutoring
from his father, who realized that his mental child mostly
just needed to be challenged by education to engage with it.
(06:07):
This is something, of course, that is recognized as part
of a person's learning profile now, but in the mid
nineteenth century it was often mischaracterized as laziness or a
lack of focus. I think folks still struggle with being
branded lazy when that's not really what's going on today.
But to be clear, Alphonse was stubborn about the whole
(06:29):
idea of studying things he did not have a natural
interest in, and this recognition of Alphonse's need for stimulus
did not result in him becoming a good student or
having courses tailored to him. Perhaps more than anything else, though,
this period brought Alphonse and his father much closer. Before
her death, Zoe had been the parent that Alphonse had
(06:51):
been close to. But Alfos did have to go back
to school, and he was eventually enrolled at the Imperial
Lise at Versailles. This initially seemed like it might be
a good fit, but all of the same problems arose
once the newness of that situation had worn off. He
not only didn't work on his studies, he actively worked
(07:13):
with some of his friends to disrupt class. Eventually, the
Imperial Lise sent Louis d'lfberthion a letter very similar to
the one that he had received from the previous school.
They had been able to deal with his behavior until
an incident in which Alfonse, who this sounds wild to me,
had been secretly making hot chocolate in his desk with
(07:34):
the spirit lamp for himself and his friends started a fire.
But then, when he was confronted about it with literal
smoke coming out of his desk, instead of opening the
desk and revealing what had gone on, he hit his
teacher over the head with a book that ended his
formal education. But this happened just as the Frank Oppression
(07:55):
War began, so it's also possible his education would have
been put on hold then. Anyway, he managed, how it
is unclear, to take and pass the baccalaureate examination in
science and Literature on his own a couple of years later,
at the age of twenty. Alphonse wanted to sort of
bask in that accomplishment, but his father wanted him to
(08:18):
get a job, so much so that Luis Adolf found
one for him as a junior bank clerk. This went
about as well as you might think young person being
pushed into a job by their parent. It's unclear exactly
how this posting ended for Alphonse. It was a short
lived situation, though. Next Alfonse was sent to England with
(08:42):
the hope that some time abroad would mature him, and
he found London to be a bit alienating. He noticed
immediately that people stared at him just when he was
walking around, and one of his friends, who was also
French but living in London, explained that it was because
he dressed like a Parisian and that set him apart
from the rest of London. He wanted to revamp his
(09:02):
wardrobe to try to blend in better, but Louis Adolph
refused to send him money for that, so the normally
pretty aimless Adolf Bertillon suddenly was hunting for jobs, and
he landed a position teaching French for very low pay
at a collegiate school. This was really challenging because he
didn't really speak English much at all at this point,
(09:23):
but he did manage. He next moved to a position
as a private tutor, and he started to suggest to
his family that maybe after he was done in London.
He would go to university in England or in Scotland,
but his father did not want to spend the money
to enroll him in a university given his education history.
Al Fose moved on to another job, teaching French and
(09:45):
London until he was recalled to his home country for
military service in the ongoing Francoprussian War. In eighteen seventy five.
He became part of one hundred and thirty ninth Regiment
stationed in Rome, which is right in between Vichy and Lyon.
He was moved at some point from an infantry to
a clerical role, and also decided that when he was
(10:07):
done he would go to medical school, so he started
to use this downtime in the service to study medical texts.
He became fascinated specifically with the skeleton. In a biography
in the nineteen fifty six, author Henry T. F. Rhodes
states that even at this early point, Bertillon was quote
devoted to and almost obsessed with a specialized problem. This
(10:30):
was the dimensions of the human skeleton. That fascination with
the human skeleton would feed into the way that Bertion
eventually made a name for himself. But before we get
to that we'll pause for a sponsor break. After his
(10:53):
military service, Berthion returned to Paris, and while deciding what
his next move would be. Because it turned out he
didn't end up wanting to go to medical school, he
got typhoid fever and that delayed any plans that he
may have had in mind. But he may have also
been starting to panic a little at how far behind
his brothers and friends he was in terms of a career,
(11:14):
so he asked his father to help him again. Al
Foals was able to get a job working for the
police department of Paris as a records clerk with the
help of his father. He started in that job on
March fifteenth of eighteen seventy nine, and the twenty five
year old Bertien found that he had walked into a
mess of disorganized records. One of the biggest problems is
(11:38):
hard to imagine happening today. Police in France and a
lot of other parts in the world had a hard
time knowing if somebody who was brought in on an
arrest or even sentenced to jail time, had a prior
criminal record. There were forms that were filled out every time,
but a combination of corruption sloppy practices and lying on
(11:59):
the part of detainee meant that those forms were largely meaningless.
A lot of this just wound up coming down to
whether a police officer remembered a suspect from a previous offense.
Adding to that, everybody seemed to include their own set
of information on any intake documents, and there wasn't a
set list of criteria that was supposed to be used.
(12:21):
Before the eighteen thirties, that had been standard practice in
France to brand criminals, so it was easy to see
if somebody had been arrested before that was finally recognized
as inhumane and stopped, and nothing had really been developed
to identify repeat offenders in place of this branding, and
(12:46):
so this is, you know, forty some years later, that
they're still having all of these problems. After the branding
was outlawed, thank goodness and al false, Bercielle decided that
he would just restructure the whole system, and on October first,
eighteen seventy nine, exactly two hundred days from the day
he began the job, Bertion submitted a report to his boss,
(13:07):
Monsieur Antrieu, the Prefect of Police. This was a preliminary
version of the system that he would eventually develop, but
he had devised a way to uniquely identify people in
a large group through a systematic series of measurements of
their bodies. Bertillon had figured out a way to plug
those measurements into formulas that could sort people into various
(13:28):
groupings of similarities and then make that data accessible and
searchable in a way that a person could process a
newly arrested suspect and then check pretty easily to see
if that person had a prior record. For a very
simplified example, Bertillon had made an initial sorting of all
the records by head measurements, so you would need to
(13:48):
measure the person in question and then see if you
needed to look in the cards that were small, medium,
or large, and so that already eliminated two thirds of
the possible options. The remaining one third would then be
separated in a similar way by the next measurement, and
so on and then so on again, so you might
(14:10):
arrive at kind of a subdivision of people who had
the same forearm length from elbowcrease to wrist, all grouped together.
There would be a card for each of those people
in a set that match those measurements, and a police
officer would use that measurement to find the card set
and then sift through just a couple a dozen cards,
not all the cards, to see if the same suspect
(14:32):
had been previously booked or incarcerated. I feel like this
is sort of a dichotomous key for humans. If anybody
remembers that from like biology class, additional measurements could be
searched the same way to cross reference and verify the
identity of the person at hand. The entire system was
(14:53):
predicated on Bertillon's realization that no two people would have
all identical measurements. Uh. I will say this sounds maybe fiddley,
but it sounded completely cocka mamy to Prefect Andreelle. Also
that no two people having all identical measurements did come
back to bite him. We'll get to that. Bercion was
(15:15):
really disappointed that his superior did not see the functionality
of this system, so he decided he would further refine
it over the next six weeks, and then he submitted
an updated version of the report, hoping that this time
it would convince Andreau of its value. This time, he
was told very clearly the police had an established record
(15:35):
keeping method and it was fine. And in response, Alfonse
Bertillon told his superior that the system was actually a
mess and of little practical use. It probably went over
really well, but because he was a new clerk who
had no prior experience in the field, he was told
to simply drop it. And because his father had been
the one to get him that job, Louis Adolph Bertillon
(15:58):
got another letter about his son, this one suggesting not
that he was unfocused or high spirited like the ones
he had received when Alfonse was in school. This one
suggested pretty bluntly and kind of grossly that there might
be something actually wrong with Alphonse, mentally like maybe your
kids should get treatment. But once Alfalse showed his father
(16:20):
what he had been working on, the Elder Bertion totally
understood it, and he had some insights into why other
people might not. Initially, this combination of statistics with physiological
analysis had never been used in quite this way. It
was complex, but it did really make it possible to
find existing information about a person if they were in
(16:40):
the records, and to build up his database of cards,
which got pretty large. Bertion had visited prisons and took
measurements of inmates as well as taking the measure of family,
friends and associates, so he had a pretty big data
set that he could show, hey, look this works. This
use of anthropometry not just the measuring of the human
(17:00):
but the study of those measurements was not a new concept.
It's still used for a variety of applications today. It
is a study that has a lot of problematic issues
in its history because often the data collected had been
used to try to make connections about race and behavior.
The pseudosciences of phrenology and physiognomy are based on it,
(17:24):
and there have been many, many, many anthropologists over the
years who have announced incorrect, generalized conclusions about groups of
people using anthropometry as their evidence. Today this is mostly
used for things like designing seats for cars and airplanes,
for things like clothing size for manufacture. But in the
(17:44):
eighteen eighties, Bertanil was not trying to use interpretive analysis
to suggest that people with measurement X were more likely
to commit a certain type of crime, although the system
did get used that way by some police departments. We
have talked about that on the show recently. He was
just trying to show that no, two people would have
(18:04):
the exact same data set, and that if you set
up a system correctly, you could use their unique profile
to search for them in a big system. This also
has some problems to talk about in a bit. They're
different problems though than trying to say that you can
tell whether somebody is a criminal by what their head is,
Like yeah, and he even said as much in an
(18:26):
interview with prior podcast subject Ida Tarbell at one point
like no, no, no, that's not what this is for.
You cannot make the connection that like a man with
blue eyes will do X, Y or z, Like this
is literally just to find people, although he was also
aware that people were going to make those jumps, and
although Alphos's organizational system was not getting any recognition at work,
(18:47):
with his father's encouragement, he continued to refine it on
his own time. He had a growing collection of measuring tools,
and he made continuously updated records of himself and other volunteers.
The list of measurements eventually included the length and width
of the head, the length of the middle finger, the
length of the left foot, and the length of the
(19:07):
forearm from elbow to the end of the middle finger.
There were also notes recorded of body shape, any scars, tattoos,
or other unique identifiers, eye color, hair color, and it's
listed as like hair quality. It sort of comes down
to like hair texture and like is it thick, is
it thin? Is it curly? Is it not. He also
(19:28):
included a fairly new technology, which was photography. We've talked
about the history of photography many times on the show before,
so this is not really new information. The de geratype
was introduced in eighteen thirty nine, four decades before this
work by Bertillon, and in those four decades it had
progressed considerably. It still was pretty new though. The first
(19:50):
mass market camera was still about ten years away, and
there was already photography in use in police precincts, but
it wasn't really commonplace. Bertil felt that his measurement system
would be even more useful if he could attach standardized
photos to the records. He established measured distances from the
(20:11):
chair that the subject was seated into the camera, and
the full front and full side angles they would be
photographed from. This system, known as portrait parlai, is considered
the invention of the mug shot. If you've ever seen
old mugshots, from Europe in particular, in which there were
what looked like rulers and calipers and things like that
(20:31):
to position the subject's head. That's because they're using the
bertail age system, or a variation of it. He had,
in the meantime, not for this work, gotten a promotion
from being a junior clerk, but he was still kind
of used as a pain in the neck and an
outsider within his department. He did his job and was
apparently pretty good in terms of work ethic, but he
(20:54):
did not really make any friends at the police department.
But he was befriended by a young woman by chance.
When crossing the street one day, she asked him if
he would help her cross because she was nearsighted and
she was afraid of traffic, and he obliged, and once
they had crossed, they introduced themselves to one another. Her
(21:15):
name was Amelie Otar and she had recently moved to
Paris from Austria. When she mentioned she earned a living
giving German lessons, al Fall said he had always wanted
to learn German. That was a complete lie. He hated
that subject in school. As he was feeling stagnant in
his job. Bertillon wrote a book to occupy himself during
(21:37):
his time, and this book was titled Le Ras sauvage
or The Savage Races. Holly didn't find a lot of
information on this book's specific contents, but it's usually dismissed
as a messy, poorly researched title that was more of
Bertillon's musing on things he didn't have a lot of
exposure to than on any kind of actual scientific exam
(22:00):
of anything. Also, based on its title, seems like it
must have been incredibly racist. This book did not do well,
but he had dictated it to Amalie and the two
of them had become very close, and soon she was
taking notes for him regularly. I did find, i should say,
French language versions of it, and my French is okay,
(22:21):
but not really good enough to plow through a book
of pseudo information of me, like fake scientific search. So
just if anybody's like I found this book, well yeah,
but not an English language version for good reason, I imagine.
Not long though after the publication of this book, his
boss Andreau retired and the new prefect, whose name was Cemcas,
(22:46):
had heard of Bertion's project, and unlike his predecessor, he
was really interested in it, and he gave Bertillon a
chance to prove that this system would work. He had
three months to do it, with the help of two
assigned clerks, and he had to find at least one
repeat offender in the system through his method. It took
some time, but eventually he did manage to match a
(23:07):
newly arrested man with a previous visit to the Paris
police department. The timing of that first match in February
eighteen eighty three, was unfortunately overshadowed by the death of
Alfonse's father, Luis Adolph. Despite that loss, eighteen eighty three
was pivotal for Bertillon in more positive ways. He built
on that first success by identifying more and more recidivists
(23:30):
in the police records, and he proposed to and married Amili,
who had been an important part of his efforts. She's
said to have compiled more than seven thousand of the
cards used for this system. She had, by all accounts, beautiful,
easily legible writing, so she really made the whole system
easier for users. By the end of eighteen eighty three,
(23:51):
Bertillon had identified forty nine duplicate offenders in the Parisian
police bureau records. By the end of eighteen eighty Fourertion's
process had identified two hundred and forty one repeat offenders.
This was all proof enough for his prefect to start
instituting the system officially. Bertion was tasked with getting a
(24:11):
department up and running, and police staff from other countries
soon were visiting Paris to learn this system and bring
it back to their own offices, and Bertion had some
very high profile successes. His system was used to identify
an anarchist who was plotting a bombing, as well as
a man who had faked his own death and then
continued to commit crimes. An eighteen eighty six article ran
(24:35):
in papers around the US titled identifying Prisoners, and it
announced the new system as a triumph. It read, in
part quote, the latest method of identifying prisoners which has
been introduced into France by Monsieur Alfonse Bertian, and which
is now successfully practiced not only in the chief French prisons,
(24:55):
but in Russia and Japan. As well as the exact
measurement of the prisoner on his arrival at the jail,
a photograph is also immediately taken, and by these means
the many mistakes which have been made by a trusting
photographer only are avoided. In eighteen eighty eight, France had
established its Bureau of Identification, with Alphonse Bertillon as its director.
(25:17):
Bertion's career was clearly taking off, but his arrogance was
about to trip him up. We'll talk about his involvement
in the Dreyfus affair after we hear from the sponsors
that keep stuff you missed in history class going. As
(25:39):
use of bertillonage began to spread, there were naturally detractors.
One of the biggest early criticisms was simply disbelief that
there couldn't be duplicate people within the system. In a
statement in eighteen ninety three, Bertillon said, quote the ideal
card of the average man more exactly than Frances banand
that is to say, individual in whom all the measurements
(26:02):
correspond exactly to the average dimension, quite simply does not exist.
It is never found even in the most central section
of my cabinets. There are, of course, cards which approach
this ideal configuration, but the related measures never approached each
other so closely that they can be confused. That assertion
(26:23):
would be proven wrong. There were other issues with the system,
and we're going to get to them in a moment.
But here's the thing. Bertillon was stubborn when it came
to criticism. He was terrible at hearing anybody criticize his work,
and he always insisted that the critic was the one
in the wrong. Bertion's arrogance caused a great deal of
(26:44):
harm when he was asked to consult on the case
of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, which we've covered on the show
as a two parter the short version. Dreyfus was tried
for selling military secrets to Germany in eighteen ninety four.
A key piece of evidence in this trial was a
handwritten document which contained information about state secrets and their sale,
(27:08):
and Bertil was asked to analyze the handwriting. Now, he
was not a handwriting expert, but his reputation had become
so well known for his police work that people thought
he was the obvious choice. In the six years since
the Bureau of Identification had been formed, he had developed
other means of using his mathematical formulas to measure both
(27:29):
people in evidence, and he thought he could similarly use
it to analyze handwriting. And this was disastrous. Bertillon undoubtedly
biased by anti Semitism, which was an enormous problem in
France at the time, determined that Dreyfus, who was Jewish,
had forged his own handwriting in an effort to conceal
(27:52):
his involvement in this traitorous sale of state secrets. He
explained to the court at the trial that Dreyfus had
formed the letters using a square grid as the first
disguise passed, and then worked from that version to make
a bad copy of his own writing. Bertil may have
believed that he had figured out a criminal mastermind's method,
(28:17):
but what he really did was get a totally innocent
man exiled to Devil's Island and spark an enormous cultural
rift and giant anti Semitic backlash in France. But even
when new evidence came to light indicating that the real
trader was Ferdinand Walsen Esterhousi, including a confession, and not Dreyfus,
(28:41):
Bertillon continued to vehemently assert that Dreyfus had to be
the guilty party. His testimony during Dreyfus's second trial was
described this way by a member of the press. Quote
now and again, Monsieur Bertillon's voice rose in hateful shrieks.
There were interludes when he clenched his fist, struck the bar,
swearing that Dreyfus was the trader. The voice rang out
(29:05):
with passion and excitement. You beheld in him, the man
vain unto madness, with confidence in his atrocious fantasies. He
was at last taking his revenge for all the insults
of those who had called him a fit subject for
an asylum of the insane. Bertillon never conceded that he
had been wrong in this matter, even after real handwriting
(29:27):
experts had proven his conclusions and his methods false, and
he proclaimed this correctness even to his deathbed. While this
scandal caused them damage to his reputation as a handwriting expert,
and his work had contributed made in a major way
to a very real crisis, the family cost was greater.
(29:47):
Alphonse's brother, Jacques, also a well respected statistician, was married
to Polish physician Caroline Schultz. Caroline was Jewish, and Jacques
was so upset by Alpha Vonse Bertillon's insistence that Alfred
Dreyfuss must be guilty that these two brothers had a
massive falling out and they did not speak for years.
(30:08):
Over time, the bersionage method was recognized as having problems.
From the very beginning of it being put to practical
use in police departments around the world, its flaws became
more and more apparent. For one thing, there were a
lot of devices that needed to be acquired and then
maintained and constantly calibrated for measuring. For another, there was
(30:30):
significant training needed for implementation. Any clerk or officer who
was going to use those many devices and tools needed
fairly advanced instructions on how to use them, and different
users would often return different measurements of the same subject.
Sometimes the same user would return different measurements on the
same subject if they took a second set. Bertillon, as
(30:53):
he always did, denied all of this, stating that quote,
anyone who is not an imbecile could learn to measure
in five minutes and never forget the process. This system
also did not really account for things like the way
a person's body changes as it ages, so as a
subject aged, it was less and less likely that they
would match up with a Bertillon card from their younger years. Additionally,
(31:15):
incidents started to pop up where two different people were
identified as the same person, something that Bertillon had insisted
was not possible. By the end of the nineteenth century,
as finger printing started to be adopted by many law
enforcement offices, the Bertillon system, which had briefly been hailed
as a revolutionary tool, started to fall out of favor.
(31:37):
Did not take long after its introduction. Bertillon had initially
rallied against the use of fingerprints, although over time they
started to be included with Bertillon cards in police files.
The mug shot, however, with its standard front and profile
images that's endured despite the scandal of the Dreyfus affair.
Bertillon continued to be given awards for his work criminology,
(32:01):
and he continued in his work until in nineteen thirteen,
he began to experience the sensation of being extremely cold
at all times. He could not seem to get warm
no matter what amount of heat he was exposed to,
and he shivered constantly. He was also starting to have
trouble with his eyesight. After he was diagnosed with pernicious anemia.
(32:23):
His younger brother George, donated blood for a transfusion, and
initially this helped a great deal, but the effects wore
off and he needed a second and then a third transfusion,
and George was the donator on all of it, so
it was taking a toll on him as well. He
kept working for months as this was going on, and
there's no denying that he was getting weaker and weaker.
(32:45):
In early nineteen fourteen, he was nominated for the Legendarner
Officers Rosette, but people were reluctant to give him this
award unless he met one condition. An emissary was sent
to Bertillon's home, where at this point he was having
to stay in bed, and told him that he would
receive this award only if he retracted his assertion that
(33:07):
Dreyfus had written the document known as the Bordereaux, which
had been a key component of that case. Bertil reportedly
yelled no at the visitor repeatedly. That was the end
of that. On February thirteenth, nineteen fourteen, alse Bertigon fell
into a coma. He died at eleven PM and was
buried at Perlischez Cemetery. In the September nineteen fifteen edition
(33:31):
of the Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law
and Criminology, lawyer and author Raymond B. Fosdick wrote quote
in the death of Alphonse Bertillon in February nineteen fourteen,
the anthropometric method of identification probably suffered its final blow.
For a decade, his prestigian personality were the only supports
of a system that in Europe at least, had been
(33:54):
fast losing ground. Persistently, even stubbornly, he endeavored to save
the method would was the product of his genius and
which bore his name, But he lived to see it
discarded in nearly every country in Europe except his own,
and even in France. Now that the weight of his
influence and his really compelling personality are gone, it is
(34:15):
doubtful whether his system of identification will be continued. One
of the issues that arises when looking at Bertillon's life
is that there are some big gaps in the information.
One cause was that his wife Emily and her grief
destroyed a lot of his papers after he died. As
a consequence, we really don't know a whole lot about
(34:35):
his personal thoughts on a lot of the events that
took place during his life. His actions and behaviors once
he started on the system that would be the basis
of his life's work show a man that was driven
by our pursuit of the truth, but also distracted from
that truth by Hubris. Perhaps the best summation of the
complicated Bertillon was written by Richard Fairbrother and Julian Champkin
(34:58):
in twenty fourteen for the periodical Significance, in which they
said he was quote passionate about measuring everything that could
be measured and some things that could not really be measured.
Besides ah false, Bertillon, you are a quandary. I will
(35:19):
talk so much about the various ways he has discussed
in our Behind the Scenes on Friday, but in the
meantime I want to talk to you about Stroganoff. This
is from our listener Chelsea, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy,
I want to begin by thanking you both for such
a wonderful podcast. I've been a listener since the beginning,
(35:40):
and I have loved listening to the podcast mature and
grow over time with the two of you making it
your own. You've done such a phenomenal job of tackling
difficult and interesting topics, and I always can't wait to
hear what's next. This is a little late because I
listen exclusively when driving, so I'm always a bit behind sidebar.
You never have to apologize. We suffer the same problems
when we're going about our lives. We fall behind on
(36:02):
the things you love all the time. Chelsea continues, I
just listened to your Oops All Noodles episode, and I
was excited that you were covering beef stroganoff. My husband
and I have had a long standing disagreement about how
to make stroganoff, going back to the beginning of our marriage.
He does the majority of the cooking since he's better
at it, but stroganoff is something that I feel confident about.
The First time I made it, he couldn't believe I
(36:24):
was adding tomato paste and leaving out the mushrooms because
I don't like them. He thought that was absolutely ridiculous
because his recipe uses paprika instead. He claimed that adding
tomato paste and emitting mushrooms change the intent of the dish.
I said this was how I learned to make it,
and that I would stick with what I know. This
has become such an inside joke between us that now
(36:44):
years later, when we're meal planning for the week, if
stroganov is suggested, it becomes an entire family discussion about
are we making moms stroganof or Dad's strogan Off, complete
with a lot of knowing glances and the kids taking sides.
Imagine my delight when you said that tomato panes was
added as an ingredient in the early nineteen hundreds. It
was so great that I shouted ha while driving. I
(37:06):
was in the middle of dropping one kid at preschool
and driving to volunteer at the other kid's school, but
I had just enough time to swing by home and
interrupt my husband working in his home office with a
triumphant I was right. I love this so much. Once
he understood what I was talking about, he asked me
to cite my sources. He knew he couldn't argue with
(37:26):
me when I told him I heard it from you,
because he was the one who originally insisted I listened
to the podcast. He did want to make it known
that he was also right about the mushrooms. Thank you
for always adding knowledge and delight to my drive. I've
attached pictures of our dog, Carlton. He is twelve and
has always been a crabby old man dog who just
wants to lie in the sun or be under a
pile of blankets. Cheers, Chelsea. Okay, first, of all, Carlton
(37:49):
is hilarious and adorable. I love a grumpy dog there.
He's so cute. I want to scoop him up and
kiss him, and he'd be like, please do not. Yeah,
I mean that's the saying that I discovered too when
doing the Stroganoff research, is that there are a lot
of different versions because it propagated throughout the world and
at different regions that different people created their own kind.
(38:10):
So in my opinion, there's no wrong kind of stroken off. Ever.
I'm not a tomato paste person, but if you are
and you love that, awesome. I'm like heavy on the
sour cream and mushrooms person on that one. But I'm
just glad that everybody is cooking delicious things and that
it is something that they are good naturedly poking fun
(38:31):
at each other about, not an actual argument. If you
would like to write to us about the way you
make stroganoff, or any other dish or anything else we've
talked about on the show, you can do that at
History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find
us on social media as Missed in History, and if
you haven't yet subscribed, you can do that on the
iHeartRadio app, or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.
(38:58):
Stuff you missed in history class is a part reduction
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.