Brigades of the Tiger

Name

The name “Brigades of the Tiger” comes from the nickname of Clemenceau, “the Tiger”, which was allotted to him in the Années 1880 because of its manner of putting in Bern its opponents; this nickname will be reaffirmed at the end of the First World War because of its so firm methods to treat the opponents.

Presentation

These “Brigades of the Tiger” were twelve. They will be established in the main cities of province. Each one of them is directed by a police chief, ordering fifteen to twenty inspectors who carry out their work twenty-four hours out of twenty-four while taking turns by groups of five. Thus, their not-stop activity in their investigations, monitorings and spinning mills optimizes the effectiveness of their mission and maintenance a constant pressure on the banditism.

Origins

At the origin of the Brigades of the Tiger the evolution of the company is, of technology and the banditism, as the introduction of one of the episodes of the series underlines it:

“1907. At this beginning of century when the life changes at the accelerated rate/rhythm of a triumphing industry, the traditional structures of the old company break each day more behind the frontage of the “Belle Time”. Criminality increases in all the more worrying proportions as a new delinquency was born which rests, it, on technological advance and fact failure with an antiquated police force of which the methods and the material hardly evolved/moved since Vidocq. A figure is more eloquent than all: during the year 1906, 103 000 criminal cases and correctional were classified without the authors being able to be identified. Year 1907 is still announced worse. It goes there from the safety of the cities and the campaigns. ”

Vis-a-vis this new rise of the banditism, the police force is badly prepared. It is divided into cantons. There is no national police force. The administrative loads are heavy. Clemenceau decides that it is necessary to make an financial effort for the police force.

Means

The mobile brigades were made up trained men with various techniques of combat, whose Savate (ancestor of French boxing) and cane.

This body of special police force is also the first in the world into practice to put against the crime all the resources of modern science. Thus, in addition to their physical good condition, the “men of the Tiger”, as they are called, profited from the last methods of technical investigations and the modernization of pointing of the criminals (anthropometric cards with digital fingerprints) resulting from work of Alphonse Bertillon.

This file had been reorganized like first “Central data base of the organized crime” by Célestin Hennion a few months before the creation of the mobile brigades.

This new font of elite had all the modern means to achieve their goals: telegraphs, telephones, and soon cars (Of Dion-Button and Panhard & Levassor since 1910).

Results

As of the first months of activity, the “Mobilards” obtain spectacular results. In less than two years they add up 2 695 arrests, including 65 murderers, 7 rapists, 10 counterfeiters, 283 swindlers and 193 burglars!

The Brigades of the Tiger will dismantle, inter alia, famous the Bande in Bonnot in 1912.

Adaptations

Because of “mystic” who surrounds them in the imaginary popular one, the history of the Brigades of the Tiger was the object adaptations televisual and cinematographic:

on television, in the series Brigades of the Tiger , diffused 1974 with 1983
with the cinema, in the film Brigades of the Tiger , left in 2006.

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