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Alphonse Bertillon (1853-1914) holds an essential place in the history of knowledge about crime.

Establishing with certainty ”who is who”, methodically photographing and mapping crime scenes, collecting and analyzing the slightest traces left by the criminals where they commit their crimes… Sherlock Holmes and numerous investigators from crime series and other thrillers owe him a lot.

Nothing seems to escape this sleuth who, between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, completely changed identification methods and influenced police practices throughout the world.

A true pioneer of the forensic science, he innovated in a considerable number of fields: from judicial photography to fingerprinting, from files administration to the expertise of the traces of tools used in burglaries, from tracking people sought by the police in the public space to graphology.

Records of the Dreyfus affair kept in the National Archives, photographs of crime scenes and expert reports written by A. Bertillon from the Archives of the Paris Police Prefecture, equipment used to record digital traces and camera belonging to the regional judicial identity service of the Prefecture of Police of Paris, postcards, lithographs, illustrated press and caricatures from a personal collection, furniture and measuring tools preserved by the École nationale de d’administration pénitentiaire, etc., the exhibition ”Science in the Pursuit of Crime” presents more than 200 original objects and documents from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century allowing us to understand the importance of the ”bertillonnage” and its rich police, scientific but also political issues.