A Great French Gangster
| Date | 01 October 1932 |
| Published date | 01 October 1932 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X3200500408 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
A Great French Gangster
By A. M. P.
FEW criminals have made so prominent a mark on the
page of history as Louis Dominique Cartouche. Those
whom I have dealt with in previous numbers of The Police
Journal! are known to most of us by name and to some of us by
story;
but
their deeds have been more in the nature of tales
of adventure than records of historical events. Cartouche,
who died in his twenty-eighth year, has left a record in the
annals of crime that has, so far as I am aware, never been
surpassed. He was a Parisian, and his activities were confined
to the country of his birth,
but
his fame spread far beyond the
confines of France. Even during his lifetime his activities
were recorded in the newspapers of Europe from Belgrade to
Edinburgh, from Stockholm and Moscow to Lisbon.
He started his career in much the same way as other well-
known criminals have started
theirs;
but throughout his
brief career of roguery he showed a presence of mind, a
courage, a resource and a boldness, that, directed into channels
of a law-abiding nature, might have rendered him even more
famous than he was.
There is one outstanding feature which distinguishes
Cartouche from other criminals: he gained the upper hand of
the police.
That
the police system of Paris in the early
eighteenth century was in any way comparable to its police
force to-day is not suggested. Yet Cartouche not only out-
generalled the best brains among the thief-catchers of Paris
for nearly two years,
but
was a match for the police even when
that body was reinforced by the military. I do not mean to
say that he got the upper hand of the police force single-
handed. During the palmy days of his
gang-'
Order'
he
1Jack Sheppard,
John
Nevinson, David Haggart and Dick
Turpin.
544
A GREAT FRENCH GANGSTER
545
called
it-he
could
put
more than two hundred knuckle-
dusters in the field, and most of the underworld of Paris owned
him King.
To
organise and control a gang of that size demands
qualities of which the ordinary criminal is very rarely indeed
possessed. But to the tale.
Cartouche was born in Paris in 1693. His father was a
working man, a cooper by trade, and as the boy soon showed
himself to be a lad of more than natural ability, with a gift for
learning quickly and an unusual memory, his father entered
him at the College of the Jesuits in Paris. In the ordinary
course of events this should have been the making of the young
man, but unhappily it proved precisely the opposite; it was,
in fact, the first step that sent him on what we, as moralists,
call
'the
downward path.' For at this college he came in
contact with boys of a higher socialposition than himself, and
it was his very natural desire to be on a par with them in every
way that suggested to him the means of accomplishing that
wish. Many of these boys were the sons of families of con-
siderable social position in
Paris;
most of them had a fair
amount of pocket-money; all of them were well provided
in the way of clothes and boyish luxuries; and some of them
had valets to look after them.
To
Cartouche
it
seemed
an eminently desirable thing to have a lot of pocket-
money, plenty of good clothes, and a valet to look after
one. His first attempt to procure the money with which his
father was unable to supply him was by defrauding some
women who came to sell fruit at the college gate. Finding,
however, that the income which he acquired by this means
was not very large, he took to stealing the books of his school-
fellows, which, at convenient opportunities, he disposed of to
the booksellers of Paris. But he needed more money, much
more than he could acquire by petty thefts, if he were to hob-
nob with the nobility.
He was at this time eleven years old, and with a wise
precocity had attached himself to the richest of his school-
fellows, a young marquis who was in the same form with him.
This marquis was attended by a valet. One day Cartouche
chanced to overhear the valet telling his master that he had
2M
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