A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

swore to ‘get’ Vidocq when they came out; no one actually tried it, for their resentment evaporated
quickly. During his early days as an informer, Vidocq met two hardened criminals he had known in
jail, spent twenty-four hours drinking with them, and agreed to take part in a robbery which would
include cutting the throats of two old men. He managed to get a note to M. Henry, and the police
were waiting for them as they climbed over a garden wall. Someone fired; Vidocq dropped to the
ground, pretending to be hit. And one of his fellow burglars had to be restrained from flinging
himself in sorrow on Vidocq’s ‘body’. It is again a matter of the ‘xenophobic’ reaction - ‘them’ and
‘us’. W. S. Gilbert was perfectly correct when he pointed out that ‘when a felon’s not engaged in
his employment’ he is as human and sentimental as anyone else. Vidocq often took the trouble to
get to know men he had been instrumental in sending to the guillotine or life-imprisonment,
performing small services - like taking messages to families - and formed genuinely warm and
close relationships with them. He even instituted a custom of standing in the prison yard to watch
the men being chained together before they were led off to the galleys. On the first occasion, they
raged at him like wild beasts and dared him to come among them. Vidocq did precisely that - while
prisoners looking out of barred windows urged the convicts to kill him. Yet no one touched him;
they respected his bravery. Vidocq accepted various small commissions - final messages to wives
and sweethearts - and parted from the convicts on the friendliest of terms. The socialists were
obviously not entirely mistaken to argue that crime was largely a question of social conditions. The
criminal with a ‘grudge against society’ had not yet made his appearance.
He made it, in fact, in 1834, the year after Vidocq’s retirement, in the person of Pierre Francois
Lacenaire. In December of that year, an old woman and her son were found murdered in their room
in Paris, stabbed and hatcheted. A few weeks later, there was an attempt to murder a bank
messenger who had been summoned to a room to collect money from a ‘M. Mahossier’. Although
badly wounded, he managed to shout, and his two assailants fled. He was able to describe
‘Mahossier’, and Vidocq’s successor Canler, who was placed in charge of the case, discovered that
Mahossier was really a crook named Lacenaire, who used many aliases. Two of his accomplices
were arrested and confessed. Finally, Lacenaire himself was arrested as he tried to negotiate a
forged bill; infuriated that his companions had betrayed him, he also made a full confession - to the
murder of the old woman and her son, as well as the attempt on the bank messenger. In prison, he
wrote his Memoirs, and became something of a celebrity. For Lacenaire was far more educated, and
far more intelligent, than the average criminal. He wrote poetry, studied anarchist literature, and
regarded himself as a rebellious outcast of society.
Lacenaire’s Memoirs tell a story that is familiar today, but was in those days unique: the
oversensitive child who was jealous of the attention his parents gave to his elder brother, and who
developed an immense capacity for resentment and self-pity. ‘A victim of injustice since infancy, I
had... created a view of life quite different from other men’s.’ He stole to gain attention, and found
that it only made his parents furious. After two boring years in a bank he came to Paris and tried to
live by his pen, found this impossible and joined the army, then grew bored and deserted. He turned
his talent to forging bills of exchange. In Italy, he discovered that one of his fellow hotel guests had
told the police that Lacenaire was probably a fugitive from justice; Lacenaire invited the man out
for a walk in the woods, ordered him to fight a duel, and then, when the man refused, shot him
through the head. Another spell in the army ended in disgrace. And when he began to feel weary
and desperate, his self-pity suggested that someone must be to blame, and that ‘the someone’ was
Society. ‘I determined there and then to be the scourge of Society...’ He was reasoning in the same
manner as Carl Panzram, but half a century before Panzram’s birth. Like Panzram, he was
convinced that other people deserved the blame. ‘Some people will say to me “What are you