Vidocq

Vidocq is a Silver Ladder Hierarch of Paris who famously invited the Free Council into an alliance with the Diamond following the Great Refusal of 1899^[1].

Overview

If Vidocq ever traveled beyond the Île-de-France in his lifetime, he never mentioned it. A young recruit to the Sûreté, the civilian police force of Paris, he Awakened in 1858 after becoming obsessed with a series of murders the police had deemed unrelated. Though the authorities arrested clear perpetrators for each, Vidocq learned the true culprit was a Seer of the Throne. A Diamond cabal who took Vidocq in dealt with that Seer.

Naming himself after the Sûreté’s founder, Vidocq joined the Silver Ladder and became a Factotum, a Sentinel, and a Lictor. He despised unfairness in the law, whether Sleeper law under Emperor Napoleon III or the Lex Magica, and made punitive judgments against those he saw as abusing positions of authority. After censuring the Arrow Provost of Paris for seizing a Hallow claimed by a Nameless column, he became known among the region’s non-Diamond mages as the Consilium official to trust, which helped him broker peace with the Parisian Assembly during the Third Republic’s end and ensured the safety of mages on both sides through the Paris Commune. His accomplishments saw him acclaimed first as théarch Councilor and later Hierarch. When that Assembly became the flashpoint of the Great Refusal, Vidocq lent his Consilium’s aid and advised peers across Europe to do the same. He invited mages from across the world to the Great Convocation of Paris, ostensibly to welcome the new 20th century, and whipped a surprise vote to acknowledge the newly formed Free Council.

As the most accomplished théarch ever in terms of the Order’s goals — he was, after all, directly responsible for bringing tens of thousands of mages into the Awakened Nation — Vidocq spent the remaining decades of his life described as the Lafayette to the Nameless’ Revolution and lauded with honorific titles like “Grand Magister” from Consilia he never visited. He was most proud of the title the Free Council voted to give him: “Libertine.”

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