If Le Progrès is to be believed, Windsor at the turn of the last century was violent and dangerous place. One must bear in mind, however, that then as now, articles about crime and violence helped to sell newspapers. Le Progrès offered its readers much more than objective reports of local crimes : the stories it ran were entertaining and action-packed, relating in the most colourful way possible details of fights, robberies, rapes and murders that took place in Windsor and surrounding areas. In those days before the advent of radio and television, people read newspapers as much to be entertained as to be informed.

Crime reports in Le Progrès were sometimes presented in a humourous, ironic tone , , . Most of the time, however, the reporting was accompanied with much moralizing and they appealed to the readers’ worst prejudices . But certain stories have a surprisingly modern and liberal point of view (as, for example, the following article concerning a young woman accused of infanticide . Hotels seemed to have been the scene of frequent and terrible altercations , , . Other crimes took place in broad daylight, shocking and at the same time titillating the entire population, who followed the details of the crime in weekly instalments published in the manner of serialized crime novels , . No one was safe from the criminals who seemingly lurked in every corner of the city : even the son of Aurèle Pacaud, publisher of Le Progrès, was the victim of an attempted murder! .

Violent crime did not confine itself to Windsor: even the County could be the scene of bloody incidents , . Sandwich in particular seemed to be a veritable hotbed of crime and vice , , . The good citizens of that town were apparently provoked to come up with their own solution to ensure the safety of the community - a solution which had the implied blessing of Le Progrès. However, the ugly attitudes which surfaced in the wake of an incident of rape in Sandwich make it clear that the remedy was probably worse than the problem .

Sandwich, as the seat of Essex County, was also home to the provincial court-house and jail and was the site of two notorious executions : the hangings of Luke Phipps , and Joseph Trusky , Le Progrès also provides us with the list of the ten people hanged in Sandwich from 1834 to 1894 .