He spent much time in the armories (fighting halls) of Arras and acquired a reputation as a formidable fencer and the nickname le Vautrin ("wild boar"[N 1]).

By age fourteen, he had stolen a large amount of money from the cash box of his parents' bakery and left for Ostend, where he tried to embark to the Americas; but he was defrauded one night and found himself suddenly penniless.

[citation needed] On 8 August 1794, when he was barely nineteen, Vidocq married Anne Marie Louise Chevalier after a pregnancy scare.

Worn out by the bad treatment of every species which I experienced in the prison of Douai, tormented by a watchfulness redoubled after my sentence, I took care not to make an appeal, which would keep me there some months.

It is unnecessary to say that I was relying on escaping en route.In the prison of Bicêtre, Vidocq was to wait several months for the transfer to the Bagne in Brest to toil in the galleys.

In Cholet, he found a job as a cattle drover and, in this capacity, passed through Paris, Arras, Brussels, Ancer and finally Rotterdam, where he was shanghaied by the Dutch.

He again tried to become a legitimate merchant, but his former wife found him in Paris and blackmailed him for money, and a couple of former fellow convicts forced him to fence stolen goods for them.

He sounded out his inmates and forwarded his information about forged identities and unsolved crimes through Annette to the police chief of Paris, Jean Henry.

Vidocq described his work from this period: It was with a troop so small as this that I had to watch over more than twelve hundred pardoned convicts, freed, some from public prisons, others from solitary confinement: to put in execution, annually, from four to five hundred warrants, as well from the préfet as the judicial authorities; to procure information, to undertake searches, and to obtain particulars of every description; to make nightly rounds, so perpetual and arduous during the winter season; to assist the commissaries of police in their searches, or in the execution of search warrants; to explore the various rendezvous in every part; to go to the theatres, the boulevards, the barriers, and all other public places, the haunts of thieves and pickpockets.Vidocq personally trained his agents, for example, in selecting the correct disguise based on the kind of job.

Rumors at the time claimed that Vidocq set criminals up, organizing break-ins and robberies and having his agents wait to collect the offenders.

Finally, the Comte Jules Anglès, prefect of the Paris police, responded to a petition from Vidocq and requested an official pardon, which he received on 26 March 1817 from King Louis XVIII.

After the assassination of the Duc de Berry in February 1820, Police Prefect Anglès had to resign and was replaced by the Jesuit Guy Delavau, who set a high value on religiousness among his subordinates.

[clarification needed] Finally, Vidocq's immediate superior, police chief Henry, retired and was succeeded by Parisot, who was soon superseded by the ambitious but also very formal Marc Duplessis.

To save you, sir, the trouble of sending me further similar complaints in the future, and me the inconvenience of receiving them, I have the honor to solicit you for accepting my resignation.He then wrote his memoirs with the help of a ghostwriter.

In addition, the machines cost money, the semi-skilled workers needed food and clothing, and the customers refused to pay market prices with the argument that he had a seemingly cheaper workforce.

When Vidocq delivered a few useful tips that helped to solve a burglary in Fontainebleau and led to the arrest of eight people, the new police prefect, Henri Gisquet, again appointed him chief of the Sûreté.

While, under any circumstances, I was happy to serve you, you can count on my loyalty and devotion by any means.On the same day, the Sûreté was dissolved, then re-established without agents with criminal records, no matter how minor their offenses.

In 1833, Vidocq founded Le bureau des renseignements ("Office of Information"), a company that was a mixture of a detective agency and a private police force.

His squad, which initially consisted of eleven detectives, two clerks and one secretary, pitted itself on behalf of businesspeople and private citizens against Faiseurs (crooks, fraudsters, and bankruptcy artists), occasionally using illegal means.

During the trial, Vidocq had to give testimony about many other cases, among them, the kidnappings of several women whom he had allegedly delivered to monasteries against their will at the behest of their families.

Vidocq immediately appealed, and through the intervention of political friends like Count Gabriel de Berny and the attorney general, Franck-Carré, he quickly got a new trial, this time with the chief judge of the court royale.

However, it should be said that a famous predecessor Antoine de Sartine who organised the secret police under the monarchy before the French Revolution influenced other governments of Europe, Catherine II of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria, and the Pope.

Nonetheless, Vidocq is credited with the introduction of undercover work, ballistics, criminology and a record keeping system to criminal investigation.

Vidocq persuaded his superiors to allow his agents, who also included women, to wear plain clothes and disguises depending on the situation.

[14] Jürgen Thorwald stated in his book Das Jahrhundert der Detektive (1964) that Vidocq had a photographic memory that allowed him to recognize previously convicted criminals, even in disguise.

On 21 December 1860, The Times reported on a court ruling in which a murderer in Lincoln named Thomas Richardson had been convicted with the help of ballistics for the first time.In 1990, the Vidocq Society was founded in Philadelphia by forensic artist/sculptor Frank Bender (d. 2011).

In Victor Hugo's Les Misérables (1862), both main characters, the reformed criminal Jean Valjean and Police Inspector Javert, were modeled after Vidocq, as was the policeman Monsieur Jackal in The Mohicans of Paris (1854–1855) by Alexandre Dumas.

[citation needed] He also was the basis for Rodolphe de Gerolstein, who secured justice in the serial newspaper novel The Mysteries of Paris of Eugène Sue in the weekly newspaper Journal des débats; and he was the inspiration of Émile Gaboriau for Monsieur Lecoq, one of the first scientific and methodical investigators who played the lead role in many adventures, who in turn was a major influence for the creation of Sherlock Holmes.

In the Sandman Slim series of urban fantasy books by Richard Kadrey, a fictionalized version of Vidocq is a friend and mentor to the protagonist James Stark.

It was followed in April 1948 by the next French version of Vidocq's life story, The Cavalier of Croix-Mort, directed by Lucien Ganier-Raymond with Henri Nassiet in the lead.