Mémoires de Canler

Collection "Le temps retrouvé. Documents XIV".

Edition presented and annotated by Jacques BRENNER.

"Canler is an ancestor of Commissioner Maigret, at the time when the Security Brigade, which was to become the Judicial Police of the Quai des Orfèvres, was organised. His Memoirs are indispensable to all those interested in the history of the police in France. It provides an accurate description of the world of crime in the first half of the 19th century and the account of many famous cases. This contemporary of Eugène Sue gives us to read new Mystères de Paris where everything is true. Canler also teaches us about the daily realities of his time, at various levels of society, and about the historical events transfigured by legend. A privileged witness to the various regimes that succeeded one another during the First and Second Empire, he reveals the underside of political life: agents provocateurs, purges, plots, attacks, riots and revolutions. This is not the least exciting aspect of these Memoirs".