Sherlock Holmes, like many Englishmen, was wildly suspicious of the French.
In the 19th Century, it was a great source of cultural anxiety in England whether to imitate or disavow French policing styles. As Sita A. Schütt notes, “It is not for nothing that Moriarty was otherwise known as the Napoleon of crime, that Poe’s Chevalier Dupin invented ratiocination from a comfortable armchair in a darkened room in Paris, or, for that matter, that Sherlock Holmes takes such pains to scoff at the French police, notably a certain detective named Lecoq, who, he claims, ‘was a miserable bungler.’”
Indeed, Holmes derides Dupin’s abilities as well. In A Study in Scarlet, he tells Dr. Watson, “No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin… Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine.”
Still (perhaps because Dupin was the brainchild of American Author Edgar Allan Poe), Holmes acts particularly disgusted by Lecoq (the creation of author Émile Gaboriau). When Watson asks Holmes is he is a fan of the French detective, Holmes groans, “That book made me positively ill…I could have done it” (solved the crime) “in twenty-four hours. Lecoq took six months or so. It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid.”
Holmes stopping to rib the French speaks to the Victorian zeitgeist. The French police system had inspired an entire national literature of policing, starting with the swashbuckling memoirs of Eugene-Francois Vidocq—a former criminal-cum-informant who proved so talented at intelligence and investigation that he rose through the ranks of the French police system, eventually establishing France’s first detectives bureau, the Sûreté nationale, in 1813. France’s police system was deeply entwined with its arts and culture; Vidocq, for example, was Chief of Police of Paris from 1809 to 1827, and inspired Honoré de Balzac’s Vautrin trilogy—Le Père Goriot in 1834, Illusions Perdues in 1843, and Splendeurs et Misères des Courtisanes in 1847—among many other novels and plays.
Vidocq also inspired Gaboriau’s detective Monsieur Lecoq, who was the leading contemporary detective in French literature, created in 1866 and appearing in five novels and an additional short story for a decade. This is in addition to the memoirs that he wrote, published in France from 1828 to 1829, which were quickly translated to English and adapted as stage plays. In 1829, in Britain, there were two separate theatrical adaptations of his memoirs, including Douglas Jerrold’s Vidocq! The French Police Spy and John Baldwin Buckstone’s Vidocq, The French Police Spy.
Perhaps because of the dramatic, semi-nonfictional police tales that had long been emerging from France, the English had grown restless for their lack of an equal. In an article which appeared on May 31st, 1884, in Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, entitled “Our Detective Police,” the author lamented that the English system of policing was too unlike the French to be successful. “The detection of crime is evidently not an art that has been cultivated in England,” the writer complained. “The French detective is a man who would never be thought, by any one [sic] who did not know him personally, to be connected with the Police… the facility with which he assumes all kinds of disguise, and the admirable manner in which he acts the part he assumes, must be seen in order to be realised [sic].”
The French detectives had reputations for being flamboyant and creative in their pursuit of criminals. Holmes dons disguises as well (and at least once disguises as a Frenchman), so his complete disdain for “French-coded” policing is a bit hypocritical. But we might expect as much from an Englishman at the time. Arthur Conan Doyle was spot on in his characterization of this era in the long history of of Anglo suspicion about Gaul.
Disdain for the French? “Élémentaire, mon cher Watson.”
