Charrié. Léon, Joseph. 27 ans, né à Paris XVllle. Garçon Plombier. Anarchiste. 1/3/94.

Art Historical Context

In 1894, French forensic pioneer Alphonse Bertillon captured this stark portrait of Léon Joseph Charrié, a 27-year-old plumber's apprentice Paris's 18thondissement, labeled an "anarchiste." The image, part of Bertillon's revolutionary anthropometric system—known as *bertillonage*—documents Charrié's arrest on January 3 amid France's turbulent "Age of Anarchism." This era saw a wave of bombings and political assassinations, including the killing of President Sadi Carnot, fueling government crackdowns on radicals. Bertillon, chief of the Paris Prefecture's Identification Service, standardized criminal photography with precise full-face and profile views, body measurements, and meticulous notations to create unique identifiers before fingerprints dominated. Printed as a small albumen silver print from a glass negative (10.5 x 7 cm), the photograph's clinical detail—faint lines etched on the negative for scale—transforms a routine mugshot into a haunting artifact of social unrest and early forensic science. Today, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Gilman Collection, this work bridges art and history, highlighting photography's shift from portraiture to scientific tool while humanizing a forgotten figure in France's anarchist struggle.

About the Artist

Alphonse Bertillon · 1853–1914

Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) was a pioneering French photographer whose work revolutionized forensic documentation, transforming police identification into a precise visual science. Born in Paris on April 22, 1853, he was the son of medical professor and statistician Louis-Adolphe Bertillon and the younger brother of demographer Jacques Bertillon. Lacking formal higher education after expulsion ...