Alphonse Bertillon and his contribution to the development of criminalistics

This Frenchman went down in history as a well-known criminalist, the creator of a special method, according to which the recognition of criminals should have taken place by measuring individual parts of the human body and head. Alphonse Bertillon - funny for many people - had access to prison cells, where he was engaged in measuring the physical parameters of prisoners.

He had to make 15 measurements to compose an anthropometric portrait. For example, to find out what the length of the thumb or little finger is, to determine the diameter of the head, the width of the forehead, etc. His fussy movements evoked smiles, and sometimes even obscene jokes of the prisoners, but no one could imagine what this inconspicuous gentleman with curly head would achieve And dandy mustache - Alphonse Bertillon. Contribution to criminology of this person is actually very large. He is the founder of the method of identifying a person by anthropometric data, which was later named after him by the Bertillonage.

Alphonse Bertillon: biography, life story

The future criminalist was born in 1853, on April 24, in the French capital. His father is a famous statistician and physician Louis Adolf Bertillon. He was a member of the Anthropological Society of Paris, and grandfather, Achilles Guillard is a distinguished mathematics scientist, natural scientist who was known in the scientific circles of all Europe. In short, the boy had beautiful genes, but neither in school nor at university he had any special successes, even was expelled from the Imperial Lyceum in Versailles. Then the young Alphonse Bertillon roamed the French province for several years.

Character

Alphonse Bertillon (you can see his photo in the article), unlike well-known relatives, did not have a propensity for science. He was unsociable, pedantic, uncommunicative, incredulous - a typical introvert. He possessed a sarcastic character, was extremely malicious and intractable, could roll up a scandal because of a trifle. It was because of this that he had to change schools three times. In his adult life, he was once dismissed without explanation from the bank, where his father arranged it. And then Alphonse Bertillon decided to change the situation and left France, finding a teacher of French in one rich English family. But the relationship there and did not work out, so that he had no choice but to return to his homeland.

Alphonse also did not know how to communicate with women or spend time interesting. He was completely deprived of musical ear, as well as a perception of the beautiful. At the age of 22, the young man was mobilized in the royal army. Apparently, here he had a hard time, because of his uncomfortable nature.

job search

After several years, leaving the service, Alphonse Bertillon was in active search of work, but no matter how he tried, he could not find anything suitable. In addition, he never received a higher education, and this complicated his search. In the end, the young man decided to ask his father for help again.

After a while, Louis Bertillon managed to arrange a son in the Police Prefecture of Paris for the position of assistant clerk. Thus, Bertillon in 1879 fell into the police environment.

Job

When Alphonse first appeared in the office of judicial identification, he was very disappointed, so his stupendous work seemed so stupid and practically meaningless to him. Strangely enough, this not only did not turn him away from activity, but, on the contrary, made him think about the problem of modern criminalistics. The employees of his department sometimes laughed at his colleague's attempts to change something and could not even imagine that the founder of the new method, Alphonse Bertillon, was before them. Criminalistics with his light hand during that period made great progress.

New ideas

Every day, employees of his department had to write down and review hundreds of thousands of cards describing people who had ever committed a crime. However, Bertillon, born and raised among mathematicians, felt that there was something wrong in his work that there was no systematization that could help in his work. And so, remembering the anthropometric parameters, he began to measure certain parts of the body of suspects and filled out the questionnaires that had been filed against the criminals.

Knowing the biography of this man, it is almost impossible to believe that he is the founder of a new era in forensic science. After the method he proposed was adopted and gained popularity, articles with loud headlines appeared in the press - "The French genius Alphonse Bertillon and his theory of the identification of judicial errors", "Long live the Bertillonage method" is the greatest discovery of the 19th century! " .

The essence of the method

During the period when Bertillon created a new method, there was neither the possibility of photography nor fingerprinting - the identification of a person according to fingerprints. Since the information on the criminals was not systematized, some information was recorded in the cards, that is, they represented a verbal portrait. However, these descriptions suited many thousands of people, besides, there was practically no information about their anthropometric data.

Alphonse realized that it was foolish to write surface characteristics such as high-low, thick-thin. It is much more important to inscribe in the questionnaire the exact growth, the width of the shoulders, the length of the hands to the fingertips, etc. That is, make measurements of those human parameters that are constant. Moreover, identification in the future should go not according to one or two parameters, but by 14-15. The probability of error in this way will be minimized. To be more precise, A. Bertillon established that when a combination of fourteen parameters, for example, height, upper body length, circumference and length of the head, the length of the hands and feet, and also each of the fingers, etc., mature man, the chance of coincidence will be 1 to 250 million.

Work process

Of course, his proposal to compose an anthropometric portrait was accepted with distrust. However, he was given a chance to work on this and prove his effectiveness. Colleagues chuckled at the way he took the ruler in his hands, compared faces of criminals in photographs, measured the distance between the eyes, the length and width of the nose and nose, and so on.

Then the criminalist received permission from his superiors and visited prison cells, measuring the prisoners. Of course, every time he was awarded some greasy jokes from the zeks, but he paid no attention to it and laboriously went to his goal.

With each time he was convinced of the correctness of his theory: the dimensions of 5 parts of the body are not the same at the same time. Already having in his hands the evidence supporting his theory, he presented his findings to the authorities. But after all it was necessary to systematize all this so that it would be convenient to use the data when identifying criminals. Of course, this also had to deal with Alphonse Bertillon.

The presentation of the final version of his method was to take place only after he had put everything in order and could be used by criminologists throughout the country.

Systematization

After the measurements were collected, it was necessary to create a file cabinet in which it would be possible to easily find the desired questionnaire.

According to the theory of Bertillon, when using a card file of 90 000 questionnaires, the head length can be written first as the main feature, and then all questionnaires can be divided into three main groups. In this case, there will already be 30,000 cards in each.

Then, if the second parameter is to set such a parameter as the width of the head, proceeding from this method, the unit will go to 9 groups, each of which will have 10,000 cards.

If you use 11 parameters, then in each box there will be only 10-12 questionnaires. He presented all this to the Prefect of the French Criminal Police, Mr. Surete. True, it was initially difficult to understand the endless numbers entered in the columns, and he advised not to disturb him with any nonsense anymore. However, Alphonse did not give up and did his best to prove the correctness of his theory. And then he was given a 3-month trial period.

Evidence of the validity of the theory

Of course, the chances of proving his theory for some three months were very small, but Alfonso was lucky. He needed to identify at least one criminal, information about which was contained in his complicated file cabinet. And this meant that the perpetrator had to commit the crime during these three data to Bertillon months and be detained by the police.

To the great joy of Alfonso, this incident presented itself on the 80th day of the probationary period, when he was already desperate. He was able to prove his theory, and he was soon appointed director of the identification service of the French police. Then there was the loud case "Ravachol", which brought him fame not only in France, but throughout Europe. The criminalist system was called a genius, and he was considered a national hero himself. However, "thanks to" the terrible nature of his hated subordinates. But it was Alphonse Bertillon!

Dactyloscopy, which was invented later, was deemed more accurate, and only after its introduction the Bertillonage system receded into the background.

Alphonse Bertillon: books

In 1893, Alfonso published a manual for criminologists, which he called the "Instruction for the Signal". The author in it gave diagrams and drawings of those instruments that were necessary for the study, as well as drawings on which the techniques of measuring body parts were visible.

He also gave instructions to police registrars on how to fill in questionnaires. By the way, by this time A. Bertillon invented the method of an acoustic survey, according to which the criminal was photographed using a special metric camera in 3 types: in the profile, full face (1/7 of a natural value), and also in full growth (1/20 Of the set value). These pictures also had to be attached to the questionnaires of people who had once committed a crime and had fallen into the card file of Bertillon.