When the Brigade de Sûreté was set up in Paris in 1812, it was a first of its kind: a criminal investigation bureau composed of undercover officers, which would later evolve into France’s national police force. At a time when institutionalised policing was still in its infancy, the Sûreté provided the blueprint for Scotland Yard, established in 1829, and the FBI a century later. At its head, one might imagine someone akin to the men who would follow in this bureau chief’s footsteps: Robert Peel, the Conservative politician and future prime minister who first put Britain’s “bobbies” on the beat, or J. Edgar Hoover, a law student who rose through the ranks of the Justice Department to serve as the American federal agency’s first director. Eugène-François Vidocq (1775–1857), the Sûreté’s founding chief, was nothing of the kind…

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