Abstract

Abstract:

This article examines how French writers and public intellectuals Charles Delescluze, Louise Michel, and Alfred Dreyfus documented, in their memoirs, their personal experience as convicts sent to penal colonies in French Guiana and New Caledonia in the mid and late nineteenth century. Using the act of writing both as a survival strategy and as a political weapon against the French government, they all offer a different but complementary perspective on penal colonies, unveiling the reality of a punitive institution that remained quite mysterious to the general public at the time. In order to understand the specificity of each text, I analyze them separately following chronological order. In De Paris à Cayenne: Journal d'un transporté, published in 1872, Delescluze becomes the spokesperson for French political transportees and denounces the mutilation of French Guiana's landscape inflicted by the French colonialist politics. In her Mémoires published in 1886, teacher and communard Louise Michel espouses the Kanaks' cause and invites the reader to rebel against colonialist oppression. Finally, Alfred Dreyfus' Cinq années de ma vie, published in 1901, depicts the author as a victim desperately trying to prove his innocence and who barely manages to survive the inhumane life conditions on Devil's Island.

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