Elaborate tattoos on some criminals in the late 19th century were more than body art for the lower classes. They also helped police to identify suspects in criminal investigations. For Inspector Pagneux (his first name is unknown), a member of the Sûreté (French national police force) in Lyon, these tattoos supported a personal mission to document the physical characteristics of offenders. Bressy-Louis was a criminal operating in Lyon in 1890 who became part of Pagneux’s personal almanac of villains. Pagneux’s recently discovered album of minutely described suspects is a glimpse into French criminal investigations of the time.

Before the invention of photography, much was left to eyewitness accounts and a police officer’s memory. But despite the early adoption of evidential photography in police investigations, little thought had been given as to how photographs might be used to solve and prevent crime. In 1882, French policeman Alphonse Bertillon, frustrated by the haphazard nature of criminal investigations, had devised a criminal identification system he named anthropometry. By measuring a person’s skull, height, body parts, tattoos and scars, these records allowed police to search criminal files and narrow the pool of suspects. Bertillonage, as it was later called, gave way to the world’s first database of its kind and revolutionised criminal identifications in law enforcement. For the first time, police could sift quickly through a large number of records based on only a few measurements from the person they were seeking to identify. Forces in the US and Britain soon adopted the methodology.

Pagneux’s contribution to the nascent science was to take into account the personal history of those he arrested. This approach suggests that he was also influenced by Cesare Lombroso, the Italian anthropologist credited as the father of criminology. Lombroso was a biological determinist who associated physical characteristics such as crooked eyebrows with innate criminality. Pagneux’s album represents an early attempt at criminal profiling and databases that law enforcement communities depend on today.