Bertillon System

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“There seem to be entire branches of scholarship today that believe that they have not said anything at all if they have not said the word ‘body’ a hundred times.” –Friedrich Kittler (2010, 148)


Before DNA evidence—and before that, the ubiquitous adoption of fingerprinting—became the dominant mode by which criminals were identified by law enforcement, another form of biometric identification was in widespread use around the world. This was the system of so-called anthropometry, invented at the end of the 19th century by a clerk in the Paris police prefecture, one Alphonse Bertillon. The Bertillon system, also known as Bertillonage, had a major impact on criminology, especially in its native France, around the turn of the century because “Bertillon made it possible to visualize criminality in a ploddingly bureaucratic yet devastatingly effective way” (Cole 2001, 58-59). Bertillon “placed identity and identification at the heart of government policy, introducing a spirit and set of principles that still exist today” (Kaluszynski 2001, 123). Bertillon’s system was a minor sensation in its day, so much so that it prompted a Paris newspaper to declare: “Bertillonage is the greatest and most brilliant invention the nineteenth century has produced in the field of criminology. Thanks to a French genius, errors of identification will soon cease to exist not only in France but also in the entire world. Hence judicial errors based on false identification will likewise disappear. Long live Bertillonage! Long live Bertillon!” (qtd. in Cole 2001, 49-51). The Bertillon system in its un-bastardized form—that is to say, when it was practiced by Bertillon himself and a few close associates—was a resounding success; when, however, the system was exported all around the world, the results were much less promising. Indeed, it seemed as if “the accuracy of anthropometric identification decreased proportionally with the distance from Paris” (Cole 2001, 52). The final death knell for Bertillonage came when in the early years of the 20th century it was swiftly disposed by a more streamlined and reliable form of identification, one that has an ancient origin but that had only begun to be used for criminal identification—mainly in colonial contexts—in the mid-19th century, and one that is still in use today: namely, dactyloscopy, or fingerprinting. A quick note to readers: those who are sick of the post-Foucauldian emphasis on “the body” that is “fashionable among contemporary scholars”—as Kittler tells us (2010, 148)—may wish to click past this dossier in silence, for thinking about the Bertillon system requires a thorough-going investment in the body as a site of identity/subject formation—a contested site that has serious political ramifications in our current generalized state of exception. As a result, the word “body” will appear somewhat frequently in this dossier.

The Need for Identification

The need for an accurate method of identifying criminals became apparent in France in the late 19th century when the country was “plagued by a mounting crisis of recidivism” (Kaluszynski 2001, 123). Martine Kaluszynski describes the response to the crisis:

A series of legislative initiatives were adopted in the attempt to attack the problem, notably the laws of May 27, 1885 (on transportation and restrictions of the rights of settlement) and of March 26, 1891 (on suspended sentences). These and other laws were based on the principle of dividing offenders into two categories, first offenders and recidivists. First offenders were to be rehabilitated through generous policies that would encourage personal reformation and social reintegration. By contrast, recidivists faced the threat of severe punishment, and the incorrigible were to be segregated from the rest of society. (Kaluszynski 2001, 123-24).

Bertillon, working in the Paris police prefecture at this time, was particularly concerned with the problem of recidivism. If the new laws were to be enforced, he believed, an accurate system would need to be in place to be able to differentiate between first-offenders and recidivists. In the past, it was possible to identify repeat offenders by cropping their ears or branding them; however, “[b]randing by hot iron had been abolished by law in 1832, and with it all possibility of such a comprehensively effective system. Thus identification of the individual as such became the key to an effective system of crime control” (Kaluszynski 2001, 124). Bertillon thought his system of anthropometric measurement of the criminal was the answer, and he was uniquely positioned to provide such a solution. Bertillon came from a “family that had multiple connections with the worlds of science, medicine, and anthropology.” For example: “His grandfather, Achille Guillard, an enthusiast for statistics, coined the term demography; his father, the physician Louis Adolphe Bertillon, was a co-founder of the École d’anthropologie; and his elder brother, Jacques Bertillon, also a physician, was the well known author of several publications on statistics and director of statistics for the city of Paris” (Kaluszynski 2001, 124, n.6). The young Alphonse Bertillon had trouble settling on a career—he spent some time in medical school but left after passing the first exam—so his father used his influence to get Alphonse a post in the police prefecture, which he assumed on March 15, 1879 (Kaluszynski 2001, 125). And so it was that “[b]y the end of that winter, he had set himself to discover an objective and infallible means of identifying recidivists. His family background, his own unfinished training as a physician, and his admiration for Italian criminal anthropologists, who used osteometric observations to support their theories, had a cumulative influence on his own research” (ibid.).

A Tripartite System

Bertillon’s system is often associated simply with anthropometry, the scientific study of the measurements and proportions of the human body, but in fact his system consisted of three parts, of which direct measurement of the criminal body was only the first. “His method proceeded in two stages, description (signalement) and classification” (Kaluszynski 2001, 125). Let us look at the three distinct parts of the Bartillonage process in some detail.


Measurement

“Bertillon started from the observations that the human bone structure was more or less absolutely fixed by the age of twenty, and that the skeleton varied tremendously in its dimensions between one person and another. On the basis of these observations, it was possible to establish descriptive data that derived from specific bone measurements” (Kaluszynski 2001, 125). Simon A. Cole describes how the measurement process would have worked in any routine arrest at the time: “A prisoner being Bertillonaged was first subjected to eleven different anthropometric measurements taken with specially designed calipers, gauges, and rulers by one of Bertillon’s rigorously trained clerks, or ‘Bertillon operators.’ Each measurement was a meticulously choreographed set of gestures in which the exact positioning and movement of both bodies—prisoner and operator—were dictated by Bertillon’s precise instructions” (2001, 34). The prisoner would undergo eleven precise measurements, selected by Bertillon because they were the proportions “least likely to be affected by weight change or aging over time (Cole 2001, 37). These “osseus lengths” were: height, head length, head breadth, arm span, sitting height, left middle finger length, left little finger length, left foot length, left forearm, right ear length, and cheek width. Kittler has determined that these “[e]leven measurements alone would already allow for 177,147 different combinations” (Kittler 2010, 141). Martine Kaluszynski notes that, “Anthropometry was premised on a proven principle: all human measurements, of whatever kind, obeyed a natural law of statistical distribution. The choice of features to be measured had to be based on their non-correlation as well as on their fixity and clarity. This represented a noteworthy bid to move away from a model confined to generalizations: here it was the detail, the particular, that mattered” (2001, 126). Certain problems arose, however, with applying anthropometry to women and children, “since their measurements did not conform to the statistical norms” (126). Errors in taking the measurements were also a constant threat to the integrity of the system. “The system was in fact only a means of negative identification that enabled probably but not absolute identifications” (126).


Portrait parlé

Bertillon needed to augment his system with a device for not only proving non-identity through a method of elimination—the raison d’etre of anthropometric bone measurements—but also establishing positive identity. Thus he developed the portrait parlé, the spoken portrait: a rigorous system of verbal description of the physical characteristics of a subject. “Rather than merely providing a black space for physical description, the ‘Bertillon card’ included spaces for descriptions of the prisoner’s eyes, ears, lips, beard, hair color, skin color, ethnicity, forehead, nose, build, chin, general contour of head, hair growth pattern, eyebrows, eyeball and orbit, mouth, physiognomic expression, neck, inclination of shoulders, attitude, general demeanor, voice and language, and habiliments [clothing]” (Cole 2001, 37). Bertillon would go on to hone his system of physical description into a precise, “scientific” language, “which he called a ‘morphological vocabulary,’ to describe human features in all their variety” (Cole 2001, 37), as well as a system of abbreviations to render that vocabulary in the most efficient form possible. For example, a typical sentence in a portrait parlé might read: cicatrix, recticular, of dimension of one centimeter, oblique external, on middle phalanx of middle finger, left side, posterior face. In Bertillon’s standardized system of “abridged writing,” this sentence could be reduced to:

“cic. r. of 1b ε, ml. 2df. M g.” (Cole 2001, 43).

These abbreviations allowed the Bertillon operator to provided detailed physical descriptions on the limited space of the Bertillon card. “Instead of writing out a description in complete sentences, choosing which features to record, the identification clerk needed only to complete the Bertillon card, which provided dedicated spaces for each aspect of the face and body” (Cole 2001, 43). Bertillon foresaw a situation in which his morphological vocabulary could become a universal language, able to be transmitted via telegraph. Bertillon wrote, “The ideal to be attained would be for it to be made possible for a person operating in another place, when he read a statement of this kind, to reproduce on his own body designs imitating exactly, as to general form, dimension and position, the marks of the individual described” (Bertillon 1896, 55). For Bertillon, the material body was made immaterial; as Matt Matsuda puts it, the criminal body became “an electric body of speed, transmitted telegraphically. This was the body to be read in many cities, provinces, across borders and regions, a body sent and received as transmitted numbers, then transcribed, translated, and reconstructed, a body whose materiality was print, wire, electricity, and transcription” (qtd. in Cole 2001, 48). Our contemporary biopolitical fears—of biometric bureaucrats buying and selling our genetic codes in some future eugenic marketplace (Gattaca), for example—can be traced back to this very moment, a moment in which, as Cole puts it, “Bertillon envisioned nothing less than the complete reduction of human identity to a language of notations which could be organized and accessed at will. . . . Bertillon reduced the body to language and the to code—turning the criminal body into pure information” (Cole 2001, 49).