Memoirs of Vidocq, Chief of the Security Police until 1827, Volume II

Eugène François VidocqProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.7
Word count
534K words
Chapters
54

Tags

Foreign Language Books General Biography Suspense ThrillerSocial ObservationLegendary LivesFate and FortuneLife PhilosophyCriminal PsychologyDocumentary Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Mémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de Sureté jusqu'en 1827, tome II by VidocqAuthor: Vidocq, Eugène François, 1775-1857,Language: French, Class: HV: Social sciences: Social pathology, Social and Public Welfare, Release Date: Nov 19, 2011

Editor's review

This is the second volume of Vidocq's memoirs, continuing the celebrated detective's first-person account of his journey from criminal to head of the security police. A rare text in nineteenth-century French social and criminal history, its value lies in presenting, from the subject's own perspective, the policing practices, prison ecology, and underworld of the period; the narrative has the candor and dramatic quality typical of memoirs, and inevitably some self-flattery. The language is French, and it is a public-domain Project Gutenberg e-book, suitable as a primary source for readers interested in French history, criminology, and policing history. This second volume is best read after the first, and can also serve as supplementary material for researchers in legal and social history. Given its age and loose structure, it is best treated as a text that combines historical source and story rather than as a rigorous modern memoir.

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Reading tips

  1. Read the first volume before this one to avoid gaps in characters and events.
  2. Keep a French dictionary or a parallel translation at hand for archaic expressions and political terms.
  3. Take brief notes by chapter, distinguishing the narrator's account from verifiable historical fact.
  4. Read alongside contemporary works on French social history to help reconstruct the text's context.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
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  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43
  44. 44
  45. 45
  46. 46
  47. 47
  48. 48
  49. 49
  50. 50
  51. 51
  52. 52
  53. 53
  54. 54

FAQ

Is this book a novel or a genuine memoir? It is a first-person memoir written by Vidocq about his own experiences, but it contains clear elements of self-fashioning and literary embellishment; it should be read as a mixture of historical source and narrative, not as a rigorously verified modern autobiography.
Can I read the second volume without having read the first? You can, but the second volume continues the characters and events of the previous one, so starting here can leave you without context. It is advisable at least to learn the outlines of Vidocq's life, or to begin with the first volume and read in order.
Is this book suitable for research on French policing history? It can be used as a first-person narrative source, especially for understanding the atmosphere of policing institutions and the lower classes of the time, but it should be cross-checked against official archives and contemporary newspapers; conclusions should not rest on the memoir alone.
What should I keep in mind when reading the e-book edition? This is a public-domain e-book with text-based formatting that may lack modern annotations. Readers should mark names, institutions, and timelines themselves and watch for difficulties caused by old spellings and historical terminology.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Eugène François Vidocq Author · French · 1775–1857

Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857) was a French police officer and a pioneer of the detective profession, born in Arras. He served in the army in his early years and was later imprisoned several times for theft; in 1809 he joined the Paris police, and subsequently created and led the security police unit that was the forerunner of the Sûreté, also founding one of the earliest private detective agencies. His representative work, the Mémoires de Vidocq, recounts his own experiences in the first person, combining autobiography with true-crime reportage; vivid in narrative and rich in detail, it circulated widely in Europe. Les vrais mystères de Paris continues his focus on the city's hidden criminal underworld. These works present the contest between police and criminals and the life of the lower social strata from a participant's perspective, and deeply influenced the emergence of later detective fiction. Because his life and writings are heavily colored by legend, reliable public information on the specifics of his experiences is limited, and readers should consult historical sources with caution; nonetheless, the tradition of documentary crime writing he represents had a lasting influence.