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T 6. The Not-So-Fatal Shore The Criminological Conception of the Fin de Siècle Bagne In his doctoral thesis, Édouard Teisseire, a Toulouse attorney, described what he believed to be the major shortcoming of the overseasbagnes of French Guiana and New Caledonia. According to Teisseire, although “the general public believes that men condemned to the colonies are in leg irons, under the constant watch of guards, engaged in the most painful work, and pass hours and days in incredible suffering . . . this is a false idea and far from the truth.” These individuals’ “adventurous spirit is pleased by the prospect of exile in a far-away land under an unknown sky, and thus the idea of punishment disappears and is replaced by a passage across the seas . . . they leave without regret a country where they have no material interests to hold them, no bonds of family, for a land where they lie about in hammocks . . . and nap in the cool shade. When they do work, they have a daily lunch hour, where they smoke and drink their wine and tafia.” Thus, “transportation is a very sweet punishment that has attracted the interest of our worst criminals. . . . All want a new life at the expense of the state.”1 Many of Teisseire’s colleagues held similar opinions.2 For instance, Henri Joly, an esteemed member of the law faculty at Paris, characterized those sentenced to French Guiana as “living like foxes in a henhouse. One begins to be convinced that transportation is a penalty that punishes little but is very expensive for those of us who pay to inflict it.”3 Famed jurist and social theorist Gabriel Tarde agreed: “The penal colony is an Eldorado for the worst criminals. In sum, it will not intimidate any more than prolonged incarceration in the metropole.”4 Even the prominent penitentiary reformer Charles Lucas believed that the prospect of a lifetime spent in the penal col- T The Criminological Conception of the Bagne  onies was “attractive to the adventurous spirit of the condemned. . . . Transportation produces an envy of sorts . . . because it provides the conditions of material well-being in transportés.”5 As there was always an element of rumor and legend surrounding the bagnes, it was believed that news of these carceral utopias traveled by word of mouth among criminals. According to Paul Dislère, a former director of the colonies: “While I would like to say that there is a salutary fear of being sent to the penal colonies, it is not a subject of fear for those condemned. . . . The rélégues and transportés know, because they have heard it from others , that the punishment of hard labor and the regimen of relegation does not have to be hard.”6 This also seemed evident to commentators dismayed by the statements criminals purportedly made after their overseas sentences were announced. Teisseire told the story of “a criminal named Delbarry, who, after being convicted to eight years of hard labor exclaimed . . . ‘Ah well, so much the better! I will be going to tame the Kanaks’ [the indigenous peoples of New Caledonia].” In another case, he described “a bandit by the name of Altmayer,” who, after being sentenced to twelve years’ hard labor, supposedly told the court: “I am going to New Caledonia, and it does not displease me; I prefer an agreeable voyage to internment in a cell; it is more enjoyable, and I can escape more easily.”7 Given that the unhealthy living conditions in the overseas colonies had long been known8 and that a sentence to hard labor in such an establishment was considered the most serious punishment after the death penalty in the French penal code, why were Tarde and other jurists so critical of the penal colony regime? What came to be the criminological understanding of the penal colonies cannot be disentangled from local officials’ coterminous complaints that there had been a general and ill-advised attenuation of punishment in the bagnes during the late nineteenth century. Indeed, at many points the criminological critiques of the overseas bagnes converge and coalesce with those inscribed in the internal memoranda and correspondence of local administrators and inspectors of the Ministry of the Marine , which oversaw the operation. As we shall see, these points of congruence are not testament to the fact that the bagnes were a tropical paradise; rather, they speak to the conflicted nature at the epistemological core of penal colonization. Indeed, penal trans...

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