At the moment of his death, Lacenaire manifested the triumph of delinquency over illegality, or rather the figure of an illegality, on the one hand, dragged down into delinquency, and, on the other, displaced towards an aesthetics of crime, that is to say, towards an art of the privileged classes. There is a symmetry between Lacenaire and Vidocq, who in the same period, made it possible to turn delinquency in upon itself by constituting it as an enclosed, observable milieu and by displacing towards police techniques a whole delinquent practice that was becoming the licit illegality of power.
