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.