Alphonse Bertillon and his contribution to the development of forensic science

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:46

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

To draw up an anthropometric portrait, he had to take 15 measurements. For example, to find out what is the length of the thumb or little finger, to determine the diameter of the head, the width of the forehead, etc. His fussy movements caused smiles, and sometimes obscene jokes of prisoners, but no one could imagine what this inconspicuous gentleman with a curly head would achieve and dapper mustache - Alphonse Bertillon. The contribution to forensics 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 Bertillonage after him.

Alphonse Bertillon: biography, life story

The future criminologist was born in 1853, April 24,in the French capital. His father is the famous statistician and physician Louis Adolphe Bertillon. He was a member of the Anthropological Society of Paris, and his grandfather, Achille Guillard, was an honored mathematician, naturalist, who was known in scientific circles throughout Europe. In a word, the boy had excellent genes, but neither at school nor at the university did he have much success, he was even expelled from the Imperial Lyceum in Versailles. Then the young Alphonse Bertillon wandered around the French province for several years.

Character

Alphonse Bertillon (you can see his photo in the article), unlike eminent relatives, did not have a penchant for science. He was unsociable, pedantic, taciturn, distrustful - a typical introvert. He had a sarcastic temperament, was extremely vicious and quarrelsome, could throw a scandal over a trifle. It was because of this that he had to change schools three times. In his adult life, he was once, without explanation, fired from a bank where his father arranged for him. And then Alphonse Bertillon decided to change the situation and left France, getting a job as a French teacher in a we althy English family. But the relationship did not work out there either, so he had no choice but to return to his homeland.

Alphonse also did not know how to communicate with women or have fun. He was completely devoid of musical ear, as well as the perception of beauty. At the age of 22, the young man was drafted into the royal army. Apparently, he had a hard time here, too, due to his quarrelsome nature.

Job Search

A few years later, leaving the service, Alphonse Bertillon was actively looking for work, but no matter how hard 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 once again turn to his father for help.

After some time, Louis Bertillon managed to get his son to the Police Prefecture of Paris as an assistant clerk. Thus, in 1879, Bertillon got into the police environment.

Work

When Alphonse first appeared in the office of forensic identification, he was very disappointed, his future work seemed so stupefying and almost meaningless to him. Oddly enough, this not only did not turn him away from activity, but, on the contrary, made him think about the problem of modern forensic science. The employees of his department sometimes laughed at the attempts of a colleague to change something and could not even imagine that they were facing the founder of a new method - Alphonse Bertillon. Forensics with his light hand at that time made great progress.

New ideas

Daily, his department had to write down and review hundreds of thousands of cards describing people who had ever committed a crime. However, born and raised among mathematicians, Bertillon felt that something was wrong with his work, that there was no systematization that could help in his work. And now, remembering the anthropometricparameters, he began to measure certain parts of the body of the suspects and filled out questionnaires with these data that were entered on 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 accepted and gained popularity, articles appeared in the press with high-profile headlines - "The French genius Alphonse Bertillon and his theory of identifying miscarriages of justice", "Long live the Bertillonage method - the greatest of the discoveries 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 - identification of a person in accordance with fingerprints. Since the information about the criminals was not systematized, some information was recorded in the cards, that is, they represented a verbal portrait. However, these descriptions fit many thousands of people, and there was practically no information about their anthropometric data.

Alphonse realized that it was stupid to write down superficial characteristics like tall-short, fat-thin. It is much more important to enter in the questionnaire the exact height, shoulder width, arm length to the fingertips, etc. That is, to make measurements of those parameters of a person that are constant. Moreover, identification in the future should go not according to one or two parameters, but according to 14-15. The chance of error will thus be minimized. More precisely, A. Bertillon found that with a combination of fourteen parameters, for example,height, upper body length, head circumference and length, hand and foot length, and each of the fingers, etc. of a mature person, the chance of a match would be 1 in 250 million.

Workflow

Of course, his proposal to draw up an anthropometric portrait was accepted with disbelief. However, he was given a chance to work on it and prove its effectiveness. Colleagues laughed at how he, taking a ruler in his hands, compared the faces of criminals in photographs, measured the distance between the eyes, the length and width of the nose and bridge of the nose, etc.

Then the criminalist received permission from his superiors and visited prison cells, measuring the arrested. Of course, every time he was honored with some greasy jokes from the prisoners, however, he did not pay attention to this and painstakingly walked towards his goal.

Each time, he was convinced of the correctness of his theory: the sizes of 5 parts of the body are not the same at the same time. Already having evidence in his hands to support his theory, he presented his developments to his superiors. 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, Alphonse Bertillon should have done this too.

The presentation of the final version of his method was supposed to take place only after he put everything on the shelves and it could be used by forensics all over the country.

Organization

After the measurements were collected, it was necessary tocreate a card index in which one could easily find the desired profile.

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

Then, if the width of the head is put in the second place, based on this method, the division will go into 9 groups, each of which will have 10,000 cards.

If you use 11 parameters, then each box will contain only 10-12 questionnaires. All this he presented to the prefect of the French criminal police, M. Surte. True, it was initially difficult for him to understand the endless numbers listed in the columns, and he advised him not to bother him with any nonsense anymore. However, Alphonse did not give up and tried his best to prove the correctness of his theory. And then he was given a 3-month trial period.

Evidence for the validity of the theory

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

To the great joy of Alphonse, such an opportunity presented itself on the 80th day of the trial period, when he was already coming todespair. 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 high-profile Ravachol case, which brought him fame not only in France, but throughout Europe. The criminalist's system was called ingenious, and he himself was considered a national hero. However, "due to" his terrible temper, he was hated by his subordinates. But it was Alphonse Bertillon!

Dactyloscopy, which was invented later, was recognized as more accurate, and only after its introduction, the bertillonage system receded into the background.

Alphonse Bertillon: books

In 1893, Alfons published a manual for criminalists, which he called "Instruction on Signaletics". The author gave diagrams and drawings of those tools that were necessary for the study, as well as drawings that showed the methods of measuring body parts.

He also gave instructions to police registrars on how to complete the forms. By the way, by this time A. Bertillon invented the method of signaling shooting, according to which the criminal was photographed using a special metric camera in 3 types: in profile, full face (1/7 of natural size), and also in full growth (1/20 natural values). These photographs were also to be attached to the profiles of people who once committed a crime and ended up in Bertillon's filing cabinet.