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

2. The Desire to Deport: The Recidivist of Fin de Siècle France

T 2. The Desire to Deport The Recidivist of Fin de Siècle France Like their predecessors in the first half of the century, fin de siècle commentators would also locate a source of disorder in the prison system and in French society. However, it was no longer the felonious criminal but rather the petty recidivist who served as the dominant figure in the cultural imaginary. Despite the fact that the attempt to rid France of its most dangerous malfeasants resulted in only a temporary reduction in the incidence of crime, the beggar and vagrant were thrust into the same penal colony web inhabited by the murderer and rapist. With the Relegation Law of 1885, those individuals convicted of four misdemeanors, such as theft, swindle, abuse of confidence, offenses against public morals, morals crimes against children, and vagrancy and begging with aggravating circumstances (i.e., while carrying a weapon), were relegated to the bagnes. The commission of two misdemeanors plus five convictions for simple vagrancy also led to relegation. It was therefore not the gravity of the crime but the repetition of the same or similar acts that constituted legal grounds for transportation.1 The elaborate effort to transport common-law criminals overseas marks an important break in the development of juridical and penal ideas in France. In the period of the Revolution and Empire there had been a general—albeit halting—move away from arbitrary penalties over whose application the magistrate had little discretionary power and toward a more individualized form of punishment. For instance, the penal code of 1791 for the first time allowed judges to vary the length of criminal sentences according to the circumstances surrounding the commission of a crime. This was followed by legislation passed in 1832 that permitted juries to consider extenuating T The Recidivist of Fin de Siècle France  circumstances and to recommend reduced penalties for criminal infractions .2 Thus it was individual criminals, not individual crimes, that were punished. Penal philosophy and practice also underwent significant change during the first half of the nineteenth century. The Napoleonic Code of 1810 drew up a scale of offenses and prescribed for them prison sentences of different lengths, establishing a hierarchy of punishment. This system of justice was to accompany a program of rehabilitation. It marked a shift away from the older, and more brutal, non-utilitarian punitive structures to penal institutions designed to make its subjects more efficient, productive, and docile. Punishment was to be proportionate to the crime committed; anything more would be not only cruel but also useless in reforming the prisoner. The objective was no longer the vengeance of the sovereign but rather the “normalization” of the subject.3 In this context, how does one account for the appearance of the Relegation Law, which—by mandating that all those meeting the aforementioned conditions, regardless of circumstance, be banished for life after already serving out their prison sentences in France—not only compromised the discretionary power of judge and jury but also negated the principles of individualized and proportionate punishment? I seek to answer this question by situating petty recidivism within larger processes of criminological and social-scientific definition. Serving as a focal point around which a variety of intellectual and cultural anxieties swirled and accreted, recidivism appeared to require an institutional solution not found within the prison system, namely, what to do with the habitual criminal who had become an object of terror and contempt in fin de siècle France. By examining this configuration of knowledge, we not only uncover the premises that shaped and legitimated the decision to transport the recidivist overseas but also disclose how the practice spoke powerfully to a profound sense of crisis in society at large. There was a growing belief in late-nineteenth-century France that the repression and punishment of criminals was a failure. Commentators found that recidivism was on the rise, despite efforts during the first half of the century to rehabilitate the malfeasant through the implementation of a separate , cellular regime. This was especially true of the government-sponsored T The Recidivist of Fin de Siècle France  HaussonvilleCommission.AppointedbyParlementin1871andheadedbythe prominent social Catholic Viscount Othenin d’Haussonville, the commission investigated the state of crime and punishment in France following the horrific events surrounding the Paris Commune. It determined that in less than two decades the number of individuals who committed...