Alphonse Bertillon and the Origins of Modern Criminal Identification

Perhaps the first attempt to create information systems that identified the individual criminal objectively was developed by Alphonse Bertillon in France in the 1880s. Alphonse was the son of Louis Adolphe Bertillon, one of the pioneers of the nineteenth-century social sciences of demography and anthropology. As such, Alphonse grew up in a home filled with anthropometric measuring tools, which were used by his father to make ‘scientific’ observations of the bodies of ‘savages’ and people of other races. The assumption underlying these inquiries was that human attributes – intelligence, savagery, race, ethnicity, heredity, evolutionary history, and so on – were manifest in the measurable features of the body, especially in the dimensions of the skull and face.

Bertillon junior was something of a misfit and did not settle down to a formal education or a career. Through contacts made during his medical and statistical work for the Paris municipality, his father was able to get him a job in the Parisian Prefecture of Police in 1879. Bertillon’s clerical work brought him into contact with the Prefecture’s collection of convict photographs, and he soon realised its limitations.[1] Photographs taken in one prison might not find their way into the central repository, whilst those from another prison did. Photographs were not in a common format, and followed differing artistic conventions based on those used by commercial portraitists. Sepia photographs did not allow identification by colour of eyes, hair, or complexion. In practice, people could look alike, disguise their appearance, ‘mug’ in front of the camera, or change as they grew older.[2] It was also a commonplace of Victorian photography that it was very difficult to obtain a true likeness in portraits. Indeed, in England, sitters successfully took photographers to court to get a refund because the likenesses in portraits were so poor.[3] As CD and EP note, the photograph was simply not a fool-proof means of identification.

Bertillon attempted to overcome these problems in two ways, through anthropometrics and standardising the photograph of the criminal. First, he surmised on the basis of the photographs of criminals that the bodily measurements of no two individuals were exactly the same. Bertillon believed that he could apply the measuring techniques that his father had taught him to criminals, although rather than using them for the purpose of classifying humanity into groups, he would isolate individuals from each other and show them to be, in some respects, unique.[4] The anthropometric technique that Bertillon developed involved elaborate measurements of parts of the body and head of a criminal using special equipment. These measurements were recorded on a card, along with carefully controlled descriptions of features based on an elaborate taxonomy of types of ears, noses, eyes, and so on, and in addition, distinctive marks and a photograph. The measurements were used to classify individuals and to allow for easy retrieval of information when they were re-measured at a later date. Anthropometry was widely adopted by the police in France, by the Metropolitan Police in London in the 1890s, and spread internationally thereafter.[5]

However, although Bertillonage allowed the criminal identity to be reduced to a code that could be retrieved from within an information system, it had serious drawbacks as a forensic technique. These included the requirement for costly instruments that required calibration; the need for training operatives in the United Kingdom and United States on the decimal, rather than imperial, scale; the problems associated with exporting the technology from metropolitan to poorly trained local police forces; the possibility of error in transcribing measurements; the time taken to perform measurements (in triplicate); and the complicated procedure for searching through records. Having to strip so that tattoos could be recorded, or the touching of the bodies of men and women whilst taking measurements, was also seen as dishonourable in many parts of the world. Very rapidly, the technique was replaced by fingerprinting, which avoided many of these problems.[6] The pursuit of forms of identification that eliminated the complex interactions between individuals and officials, shown in all the Paperwork Histories papers, was thus carried on throughout the late nineteenth, twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Bertillon’s second strategy, and in some ways a more productive one, was to introduce standardisation into criminal mugshots. For Bertillon, an individual never looked exactly the same in two or more photographs, and observers always saw slightly different aspects of the human face on a day-to-day basis. This was especially important given the fact that human faces tend to be asymmetrical, and so different when viewed from different angles.[7] So in his mugshots, Bertillon controlled the pose, lighting, and expressions of the criminal photographed to ensure as far as possible that the ‘same’ instance was reproduced. These judicial portraits were to be in two parts, giving the profile, with the eyes directed horizontally, and the full face. The subject was to be placed on a chair at a fixed distance from the light source, which should be to the left and a little forward of the face to be illuminated. Judicial photographs were also to be reproduced in the standard format of the carte de visite.[8] These standards have underpinned the official photograph in passports and other documents down to the present day. This process shows the manner in which forms of criminal identification have been carried over into the identification of the citizen. This is something that can be seen time and time again in later forms of identification technology. It also reveals how the State has taken control of the form of photographic ID from the person identified. As EP indicates, this process was later underpinned by technologies such as the photobooth, which enforced standards of lighting and distance of the sitter from the camera.

[1]Henry T. F. Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon. Father of scientific detection (London 1956) 62; Simon A. Cole, Suspect identities. A history of fingerprinting and criminal identification (Cambridge, MA and London 2001) 20, 33-34, 57; Chandak Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj. How fingerprinting was born in colonial India (London 2003) 19.

[2]Higgs, Reading faces, 24.

[3]Jennifer Tucker, Nature exposed. Photography as eyewitness in Victorian science (Baltimore 2013) 61.

[4]Rhodes, Alphonse Bertillon, 75.

[5]Cole, Suspect identities, 35-49; Clare Anderson, Legible bodies. Race, criminality, and colonialism in South Asia (Oxford 2004) 161-166.

[6]Anne M. Joseph, ‘Anthropometry, the police expert, and the Deptford Murders: the contested introduction of fingerprinting for the identification of criminals in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in: Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting individual identity. The development of state practices in the modern world (Oxford and Princeton 2001) 170-171; Cole, Suspect identities, 35–36; Anderson, Legible bodies, 167-168.

[7]Vicki Bruce and Andy Young, Face perception (Hove 2012) 88, 131-132.

[8]Higgs, Reading faces, 162.