November 24, 2023 • 16 mins
Holly and Tracy discuss Bertillon's influence in the practice of people carrying ID cards. Tracy talks about how much she loves historical uprisings that include smashing things.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Alfonse Bertillon and
Bertillonage this week. Yep, whsh I have so many thoughts
(00:23):
on this man. First of all, I want to mention
there was a really interesting article that I found on
the site Public Books, and this was written by Amanda Lewandowski,
and she makes a very good point that I had
not considered at all that this entire system was built
on data that for the most part, was collected without
(00:45):
people's consent. Right, Like we know that he used family
members and colleagues, but he also was going to prisons
and basically just measuring people, which was something I had
not considered. That article is really about like the use
of things like face recognition and in law enforcement and
what that means and the consequences and implications of it.
(01:05):
But that was an aspect of this that I had
not considered, so I want to make sure we mention it.
One of the other things that came up as a
piece of information about him that wasn't really to me
like as important to include in the episode. But is
really interesting, right we talk in the episode about how
(01:26):
you know, people could just lie when they got booked
in at the jail and be like, my name is Darron,
it's not right, it's right whatever, And I know for us,
there's got to be a lot of like what ID
cards were not standard at this point in time, and
in fact, Bertillon is one of the people who was
the first to mandate once he had a little bit
of power that in particular, again this is such biased
(01:50):
stuff that the homeless population of Paris needed to carry
identification cards, right, that was like where a lot of
that started. And that is really the of mandatory IDs
in a lot of places. So, I mean, there are
so many things about his work that carry forward today,
and yet I'm like, oh yeah. So there is also
(02:12):
a story of him talking with Francis Galton, who was
a man who was really lobbying for the use of
fingerprints during this time, and they were friends, like they
worked in similar fields and that they would you know,
see each other all the time and they had this
cordial relationship. I read one account of him that said
that even though he was you know, arrogant and bossy,
(02:35):
he would never like carry a grudge in that regard,
Like you could have an argument and he would be like,
you're a wrong idiot, and then it would be like,
let's go to lunch. Like he compartmentalized in that way
that he didn't think an argument with someone was in
any way related to whether or not they could be
friends if they disagreed on these issues. And so he
and Galton were very good friends. But apparently there was
(02:59):
an incident and I willn't able to verify it where
Galton had come to his office and unlike his usual
thing where he would just be like, yeah, let him in,
like we'll talk about it, he made him sit in
the hallway for a long time, and then he finally
threw open the door and basically said all you do
is undermine me, and slammed the door and went about
his business. All because Galton was like, we should really
(03:20):
add fingerprints to the system. Yeah, it's like the tiniest
criticism just set him off down this weird that's not
even a criticism to me, that's like a suggestion, right.
I think he took it though, as you didn't think
of everything. That's exactly the way his brain perceived it.
And so he just thought like that he was being
(03:41):
attacked from all sides by people going, hey, fingerprints really work.
That's great. Yeah, as a person who can struggle with
unsolicited criticism, like, I get that that initial impulse to
be like uh huh, But the fact that he just
(04:03):
doubled and tripled down for all time and could never
be wrong, Yeah, even when he was demonstrably conclusively wrong. Yeah.
He Okay, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not diagnosing anybody,
but I do so I'm just talking about, to be clear,
(04:25):
a pattern of behavior I know. I have seen a
lot of people fall into in my life, and I
feel like he's in a similar one. So I'm not
diagnosing anything. I'm just I don't I don't know what
causes this, but I have known a lot of people
who grew up feeling like an outsider or a black sheep,
or like they were picked on, or like they could
(04:46):
never fit in, and then they reach a point in
their lives where they start to be a bit of
an achiever and recognized as as great in some way,
and then they become air again as hell and almost unbearable.
And I've seen this happen so many times that this
weird boomerang effect takes place where like it's like the
(05:10):
second the flip of feeling like an outsider to feeling
like someone valued happens. There's almost a weird like I
was always great, you just didn't see it, and then
they can't. It's that same thing the doors close on
any sort of like hearing different than what you believe
or think. I have seen this so many times, and
(05:32):
I'm like, el Fonse Bertillon, my darling. I wish someone
had been able to get through to him, but clearly
nobody could have been because even when his brother is like,
you are actually hurting my family and your bias is
hurting my wife, he was like, well, yeah, too bad. Yeah.
We got a request recently to run the two parter
on The Dreyfus Affair as a Saturday Classic. It's newer
(05:56):
than we normally yeah, significantly newer than we normally use
a Saturday classics. And also it's difficult to do a
two parter as a Saturday Classic because it's like you
either have a very long one, yeah, or it spans
two weeks, which is tricky. That was such a horrific
national schism in France. And the fact that his obstinacy
(06:23):
and his own bias was such a key part of it.
I hate that, and I hate that he like never
acknowledged the wrong that he had done. I do too.
It's like, in some ways it feels like he is
was willing to enjoy the benefits of being considered a
(06:44):
respected authority, but he was never willing to acknowledge the
responsibility that comes with that power. To be a little
spider man about it, I was exactly thinking, the spider man,
it really is that that those you know, if you're
in that kind of position where you really can sway
public opinion, you need to be careful and measured and
(07:07):
certainly not pretend to be an expert in a thing
that you just made up some very weird assessment of,
like that whole thing of Like he must have used
a grid And I'm like, how many mental somersaults did
this take you to get to you? I don't know
if this is something that's revealed in the research at all,
(07:27):
but when I read that, I was like, are you
just making stuff up? Or do you genuinely believe that
you figured this out? I think both of those are true. Yeah, Like,
I again I could be wrong. I'm not there and
I didn't ever. I didn't see it may exist out there,
but I did not come across it. Like what led
him to that way of thinking about it? And I
(07:50):
don't know if he not so much made it up
but believed that it came to him out of the
blue because he was a genius, right, because people lauded
him as a genius, and even today there are a
lot of people who will talk about he had to
have been a genius to put the system together. Whether
it works or not, it's so unique in the way
it functions, and it did work, it just had problems
(08:12):
with implementation that you know, possibly if someone had not
been so arrogant and stubborn, they could have continued to
refine it in a way that would have really worked.
But it's like you can be a genius and also
be an ignorant jerk at the same time, Like those
two things can happen, and he's the embodiment of that. Yeah. Yeah, anyway,
(08:35):
I've been trash talking au fALS Bertillon all day, So
if anyone out there really loves him, I'm sorry. Yeah,
buffals Bertillon. We talked about the Rebecca Riot this week. Yes, indeed,
(09:00):
something that's been on my list for a really long time,
but only bumped up to the top with my frustration
about people using the word luddites in a way that
I don't And I know, I know, We've had so
many conversations about language evolving, but I think the word
(09:21):
luddites can be used in a really dismissive way to
dismiss people's concerns about a technology, when a lot of
times those concerns really do have a lot in common
with the actual Ludite uprising, because it's like, yeah, but
like this is gonna eliminate a lot of people's jobs
and also make the work they were doing worse in quality. Yeah, well,
(09:44):
there's also the tricky aspect of it, right where Like,
on the one hand, because language has evolved, it's probably
the fastest shorthand I can think of to convey the
idea that someone doesn't like a piece of tech, sure
without having to like, because you know, like taking into
(10:05):
account the nuance of everything is great, But in conversation
it's sometimes like that that will drag you off course. Yeah,
so I understand it's why it is favored by so many,
but yeah, yeah, I also just I have a fondness
for all of the worker uprisings that involve smashing things.
(10:30):
Back when we had a totally different website that had
tags that we could use to like group together related episodes,
I had a tag called smashing Things, and it wasn't
just worker uprisings. It also included things like when people
were staging train wrecks as a spectator, sport, prohibition protests,
(10:51):
and things like that. We're also in the smashing things
carry a nation, Yeah, nation was definitely in the smashing
things category. I had a quote. So we read a
couple of things from this book by Henry Tobit Evans
that came out in nineteen ten. It was about these
(11:11):
riots slash this uprising, and there was a thing that
I had in the outline that I wound up taking
out because it felt kind of ancillary. So I'm going
to read it here in the behind the scenes. So
this book was called Rebecca and her Daughters, being a
history of the agrarian disturbances in Wales known as the
Rebecca Riots. And here is a quote that was just
sort of a description of one particular incident. Quote. A
(11:36):
number of persons tumultuously assembled at dawn on seventeenth February
and pulled down the toll bar erected near the village
of plantherog not content with that, They actually set fire
to the materials and totally consumed them, together with the
toll box belonging to the said bar. A reward of
(11:57):
fifty pounds was offered for the detection of the offen.
The day previous, a person had applied to the toll
keeper and offered him five shillings for the passage of
a wedding party which was to go that way on
the seventeenth. The toll collector had refused to accept anything
under ten shillings. However, the hole was destroyed as before
(12:21):
mentioned and the wedding party passed free. The whole wedding
party account just kind of cracked me up. In the
account of this. We did not talk about women much
at all in this episode because it was largely a
protest carried out by like working men for the most part.
(12:42):
That the big attack on the workhouse did include. It
was not a crowd of only men, that was a
crowd of everyone basically, but there were a lot of
women who were kind of spectators cheering on the destruction
of the gates as all of this was happening, and
of course, always any kind of movement movement like this,
(13:05):
overwhelmingly there are like women behind the scenes who are
keeping things moving and feeding the demonstrators and laundering all
those white dresses that people are wearing to then commit
arson and teardown teardown gates. Presumably those dresses got pretty
dirty pretty fast. So that was something that came up
in a couple of my sources, and a lot just
(13:29):
sort of described this as a pretty specifically Welsh event
in history that sort of drew together a lot of
other things in Wales, like the caphil Prine mock trials
that we talked about in the episode. There's the Marie
(13:49):
Lloyd holiday tradition with the big horse's skull that happens
around holiday times and parts of Wales, which I have
to point out also appeared on Bob's Burger's. Yeah, but
out of proper holiday context. They appeared in a Halloween episode.
Oh funny. I'm pretty sure I remember this also being
(14:10):
in the some of the DLC for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
Folks can expect a possible Assassin's Creed inspired episode having
nothing to do with Wales at some point, probably a
few weeks from now, because having finished balder Skate three,
(14:30):
finally I moved on to Assassin's Creed Mirage and immediately
found some historical figures that I wanted to talk about
on the show. So anyway, I'm glad I finally got
to talk about the Rebecca Riots. It's such a kind
of wild collection of imagery of the figure of Mother
(14:52):
Rebecca and the donning address to smash down the toll
gates because people were had too much, too much happening,
too much going on, too many stressors going on in
their social and economic life lives. I hope everybody is
(15:13):
having a great Friday, and I hope whatever's happening over
your weekend is going to be fun. I know this is,
you know, Thanksgiving holiday time, which for a lot of
folks is a time of fun stuff and family and
all kinds of food. Not so much for everybody. So
whatever's happening on your Thanksgiving weekend, celebrating or not, I
(15:35):
hope it is as great as it can be. We
will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and we
will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(15:58):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Holly Frye and
I'm Tracy V. Wilson. We talked about Alfonse Bertillon and
Bertillonage this week. Yep, whsh I have so many thoughts
(00:23):
on this man. First of all, I want to mention
there was a really interesting article that I found on
the site Public Books, and this was written by Amanda Lewandowski,
and she makes a very good point that I had
not considered at all that this entire system was built
on data that for the most part, was collected without
(00:45):
people's consent. Right, Like we know that he used family
members and colleagues, but he also was going to prisons
and basically just measuring people, which was something I had
not considered. That article is really about like the use
of things like face recognition and in law enforcement and
what that means and the consequences and implications of it.
(01:05):
But that was an aspect of this that I had
not considered, so I want to make sure we mention it.
One of the other things that came up as a
piece of information about him that wasn't really to me
like as important to include in the episode. But is
really interesting, right we talk in the episode about how
(01:26):
you know, people could just lie when they got booked
in at the jail and be like, my name is Darron,
it's not right, it's right whatever, And I know for us,
there's got to be a lot of like what ID
cards were not standard at this point in time, and
in fact, Bertillon is one of the people who was
the first to mandate once he had a little bit
of power that in particular, again this is such biased
(01:50):
stuff that the homeless population of Paris needed to carry
identification cards, right, that was like where a lot of
that started. And that is really the of mandatory IDs
in a lot of places. So, I mean, there are
so many things about his work that carry forward today,
and yet I'm like, oh yeah. So there is also
(02:12):
a story of him talking with Francis Galton, who was
a man who was really lobbying for the use of
fingerprints during this time, and they were friends, like they
worked in similar fields and that they would you know,
see each other all the time and they had this
cordial relationship. I read one account of him that said
that even though he was you know, arrogant and bossy,
(02:35):
he would never like carry a grudge in that regard,
Like you could have an argument and he would be like,
you're a wrong idiot, and then it would be like,
let's go to lunch. Like he compartmentalized in that way
that he didn't think an argument with someone was in
any way related to whether or not they could be
friends if they disagreed on these issues. And so he
and Galton were very good friends. But apparently there was
(02:59):
an incident and I willn't able to verify it where
Galton had come to his office and unlike his usual
thing where he would just be like, yeah, let him in,
like we'll talk about it, he made him sit in
the hallway for a long time, and then he finally
threw open the door and basically said all you do
is undermine me, and slammed the door and went about
his business. All because Galton was like, we should really
(03:20):
add fingerprints to the system. Yeah, it's like the tiniest
criticism just set him off down this weird that's not
even a criticism to me, that's like a suggestion, right.
I think he took it though, as you didn't think
of everything. That's exactly the way his brain perceived it.
And so he just thought like that he was being
(03:41):
attacked from all sides by people going, hey, fingerprints really work.
That's great. Yeah, as a person who can struggle with
unsolicited criticism, like, I get that that initial impulse to
be like uh huh, But the fact that he just
(04:03):
doubled and tripled down for all time and could never
be wrong, Yeah, even when he was demonstrably conclusively wrong. Yeah.
He Okay, I'm not a psychologist. I'm not diagnosing anybody,
but I do so I'm just talking about, to be clear,
(04:25):
a pattern of behavior I know. I have seen a
lot of people fall into in my life, and I
feel like he's in a similar one. So I'm not
diagnosing anything. I'm just I don't I don't know what
causes this, but I have known a lot of people
who grew up feeling like an outsider or a black sheep,
or like they were picked on, or like they could
(04:46):
never fit in, and then they reach a point in
their lives where they start to be a bit of
an achiever and recognized as as great in some way,
and then they become air again as hell and almost unbearable.
And I've seen this happen so many times that this
weird boomerang effect takes place where like it's like the
(05:10):
second the flip of feeling like an outsider to feeling
like someone valued happens. There's almost a weird like I
was always great, you just didn't see it, and then
they can't. It's that same thing the doors close on
any sort of like hearing different than what you believe
or think. I have seen this so many times, and
(05:32):
I'm like, el Fonse Bertillon, my darling. I wish someone
had been able to get through to him, but clearly
nobody could have been because even when his brother is like,
you are actually hurting my family and your bias is
hurting my wife, he was like, well, yeah, too bad. Yeah.
We got a request recently to run the two parter
on The Dreyfus Affair as a Saturday Classic. It's newer
(05:56):
than we normally yeah, significantly newer than we normally use
a Saturday classics. And also it's difficult to do a
two parter as a Saturday Classic because it's like you
either have a very long one, yeah, or it spans
two weeks, which is tricky. That was such a horrific
national schism in France. And the fact that his obstinacy
(06:23):
and his own bias was such a key part of it.
I hate that, and I hate that he like never
acknowledged the wrong that he had done. I do too.
It's like, in some ways it feels like he is
was willing to enjoy the benefits of being considered a
(06:44):
respected authority, but he was never willing to acknowledge the
responsibility that comes with that power. To be a little
spider man about it, I was exactly thinking, the spider man,
it really is that that those you know, if you're
in that kind of position where you really can sway
public opinion, you need to be careful and measured and
(07:07):
certainly not pretend to be an expert in a thing
that you just made up some very weird assessment of,
like that whole thing of Like he must have used
a grid And I'm like, how many mental somersaults did
this take you to get to you? I don't know
if this is something that's revealed in the research at all,
(07:27):
but when I read that, I was like, are you
just making stuff up? Or do you genuinely believe that
you figured this out? I think both of those are true. Yeah, Like,
I again I could be wrong. I'm not there and
I didn't ever. I didn't see it may exist out there,
but I did not come across it. Like what led
him to that way of thinking about it? And I
(07:50):
don't know if he not so much made it up
but believed that it came to him out of the
blue because he was a genius, right, because people lauded
him as a genius, and even today there are a
lot of people who will talk about he had to
have been a genius to put the system together. Whether
it works or not, it's so unique in the way
it functions, and it did work, it just had problems
(08:12):
with implementation that you know, possibly if someone had not
been so arrogant and stubborn, they could have continued to
refine it in a way that would have really worked.
But it's like you can be a genius and also
be an ignorant jerk at the same time, Like those
two things can happen, and he's the embodiment of that. Yeah. Yeah, anyway,
(08:35):
I've been trash talking au fALS Bertillon all day, So
if anyone out there really loves him, I'm sorry. Yeah,
buffals Bertillon. We talked about the Rebecca Riot this week. Yes, indeed,
(09:00):
something that's been on my list for a really long time,
but only bumped up to the top with my frustration
about people using the word luddites in a way that
I don't And I know, I know, We've had so
many conversations about language evolving, but I think the word
(09:21):
luddites can be used in a really dismissive way to
dismiss people's concerns about a technology, when a lot of
times those concerns really do have a lot in common
with the actual Ludite uprising, because it's like, yeah, but
like this is gonna eliminate a lot of people's jobs
and also make the work they were doing worse in quality. Yeah, well,
(09:44):
there's also the tricky aspect of it, right where Like,
on the one hand, because language has evolved, it's probably
the fastest shorthand I can think of to convey the
idea that someone doesn't like a piece of tech, sure
without having to like, because you know, like taking into
(10:05):
account the nuance of everything is great, But in conversation
it's sometimes like that that will drag you off course. Yeah,
so I understand it's why it is favored by so many,
but yeah, yeah, I also just I have a fondness
for all of the worker uprisings that involve smashing things.
(10:30):
Back when we had a totally different website that had
tags that we could use to like group together related episodes,
I had a tag called smashing Things, and it wasn't
just worker uprisings. It also included things like when people
were staging train wrecks as a spectator, sport, prohibition protests,
(10:51):
and things like that. We're also in the smashing things
carry a nation, Yeah, nation was definitely in the smashing
things category. I had a quote. So we read a
couple of things from this book by Henry Tobit Evans
that came out in nineteen ten. It was about these
(11:11):
riots slash this uprising, and there was a thing that
I had in the outline that I wound up taking
out because it felt kind of ancillary. So I'm going
to read it here in the behind the scenes. So
this book was called Rebecca and her Daughters, being a
history of the agrarian disturbances in Wales known as the
Rebecca Riots. And here is a quote that was just
sort of a description of one particular incident. Quote. A
(11:36):
number of persons tumultuously assembled at dawn on seventeenth February
and pulled down the toll bar erected near the village
of plantherog not content with that, They actually set fire
to the materials and totally consumed them, together with the
toll box belonging to the said bar. A reward of
(11:57):
fifty pounds was offered for the detection of the offen.
The day previous, a person had applied to the toll
keeper and offered him five shillings for the passage of
a wedding party which was to go that way on
the seventeenth. The toll collector had refused to accept anything
under ten shillings. However, the hole was destroyed as before
(12:21):
mentioned and the wedding party passed free. The whole wedding
party account just kind of cracked me up. In the
account of this. We did not talk about women much
at all in this episode because it was largely a
protest carried out by like working men for the most part.
(12:42):
That the big attack on the workhouse did include. It
was not a crowd of only men, that was a
crowd of everyone basically, but there were a lot of
women who were kind of spectators cheering on the destruction
of the gates as all of this was happening, and
of course, always any kind of movement movement like this,
(13:05):
overwhelmingly there are like women behind the scenes who are
keeping things moving and feeding the demonstrators and laundering all
those white dresses that people are wearing to then commit
arson and teardown teardown gates. Presumably those dresses got pretty
dirty pretty fast. So that was something that came up
in a couple of my sources, and a lot just
(13:29):
sort of described this as a pretty specifically Welsh event
in history that sort of drew together a lot of
other things in Wales, like the caphil Prine mock trials
that we talked about in the episode. There's the Marie
(13:49):
Lloyd holiday tradition with the big horse's skull that happens
around holiday times and parts of Wales, which I have
to point out also appeared on Bob's Burger's. Yeah, but
out of proper holiday context. They appeared in a Halloween episode.
Oh funny. I'm pretty sure I remember this also being
(14:10):
in the some of the DLC for Assassin's Creed Valhalla.
Folks can expect a possible Assassin's Creed inspired episode having
nothing to do with Wales at some point, probably a
few weeks from now, because having finished balder Skate three,
(14:30):
finally I moved on to Assassin's Creed Mirage and immediately
found some historical figures that I wanted to talk about
on the show. So anyway, I'm glad I finally got
to talk about the Rebecca Riots. It's such a kind
of wild collection of imagery of the figure of Mother
(14:52):
Rebecca and the donning address to smash down the toll
gates because people were had too much, too much happening,
too much going on, too many stressors going on in
their social and economic life lives. I hope everybody is
(15:13):
having a great Friday, and I hope whatever's happening over
your weekend is going to be fun. I know this is,
you know, Thanksgiving holiday time, which for a lot of
folks is a time of fun stuff and family and
all kinds of food. Not so much for everybody. So
whatever's happening on your Thanksgiving weekend, celebrating or not, I
(15:35):
hope it is as great as it can be. We
will be back with a Saturday Classic tomorrow and we
will have a brand new episode on Monday. Stuff You
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(15:58):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.