Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854-1952 (review)

This book is the third instalment in the University of Nebraska Press's "France overseas: studies in empire and decolonization" series. As such its appeal is far broader than it would have been had the story of penal sites beyond France's national borders been pitched as criminal justice history. As Toth effectively demonstrates penal policy and the colonization of territory seized by France were closely intertwined for a century; indeed imperial ambitions and ambitions to cleanse the nation of its undesirables were at once mutually supporting and conflicting. Without France's overseas territories it would have been impossible to imagine extra-national solutions to national problems, yet, at the same time, the deterrent and retributive underpinnings of transportation undermined efforts to develop and exploit the riches of those colonies. This is the tension that Toth traces through the book.

The bagnes were "founded on the fantasy of regenerative work and labour in faraway, unoccupied lands" (xiii), unoccupied by French or other European nationals, that is. In both French Guiana and New Caledonia indigenous people were forced to make way for progress - a modern vision of punishment and an imperial vision of possession through settlement and economic exploitation. France asserted its claim to New Caledonia in 1855 and with that the right to purchase land occupied by the Kanakas or to seize any occupied zones. Since crop rotation was an established pattern of farming, this meant the expropriation of large sectors of indigenous territory, not so much for colons as for convicts, who were granted land concessions prior to the expiration of their sentences as an inducement to reform. Penal policy thus put free colonists, who had to pay for their land without the guarantee of food and supplies, at a disadvantage, while it pushed indigenous people increasingly onto native reserves and unfertile land. The Kanaka population dropped by fifty percent between the 1880s and 1900, and their attacks against colonial settlements were brought down brutally by the French military (105-06 ).

Concerns over injustices perpetrated against indigenous people played no part in French debates over the use and purposes of overseas penal colonies, however. When Britain's transportation scheme was operating most vigorously, from the late 18^th century to the 1840s, France was on its back heels as an imperial power, with many of its possessions lost and its navy weakened. Just as transportation began to wind down in Britain, and the Benthamite penitentiary building boom occurred, France began to experiment with penal colonies. During the Revolution, Louisiana had been used as a place of exile for dissidents, but without any associated penal regime. After Louis Napoleon's coup of 1851 and the navy's resurgence, colonization efforts resumed in step with growing anxieties about a criminal residuum. Algeria, Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic were all considered before Guiana was settled upon. A bagne was transplanted there in 1852 and a settler colony was established eleven years later. As in New Caledonia, the impact on indigenous peoples was near fatal, as deforestation and over-farming wiped out natural resources, and contact with Europeans brought disease. The scheme was disastrous for the French as well, who died in droves from yellow fever and malaria. Between 1852 and 1856 over a quarter of the prison population died as a result of yellow fever; dysentery and diarrhoea killed almost a quarter of convicts in 1889.

So why were France's penal colonies so persistently represented as holiday camps in tropical paradise? Toth demonstrates that the Papillon-induced image of French penal exile is remarkably recent. Prior to the 1920s, when journalistic exposés and the wide circulation of fait divers reportage began to proffer sympathetic accounts of prisoners and condemnatory accounts of prison conditions, most commentators argued that the bagnes were too soft, so loosely governed that they were an inducement to crime. Then suddenly in the 1920s and 30s the French government found itself forced to respond to...