3. Botany Bay to Devil's Island
The explorer bent so close to the paper that the officer feared he might touch it and drew it farther away; the explorer made no remark, yet it was clear that he still could not decipher it. “‘BE JUST!’ is what is written there,” said the officer once more. “Maybe,” said the explorer, “I am prepared to believe you.”
Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919
PRISON DEBATES AND COLONIAL PUNISHMENT
In the summer of 1914, as European civility crumbled into war, Franz Kafka began writing what was to become The Trial, his great indictment of the mindless machinery of bureaucratic justice. By November he had also penned “In the Penal Colony,” a short, savage description of a place and procedure of punishment.[1] At the center of that tale lies an extraordinary apparatus, at once delicate and blunt, that slowly executes a prisoner by repeatedly writing his sentence on his body. Kafka's narrative follows a gentlemanly traveler as he encounters this perfectly literate form of execution in a decaying colony. The explorer reluctantly witnesses the final, mad demise of the system and its exaggerated principles, amid a dismal environment of chronic lassitude. Kafka's work thus provides a double frame for anyone contemplating the follies of modern justice: in addition to the vast, demented calculus of The Trial, he offers a smaller, more pointed nightmare of reason gone astray in some distant tropics. This second narrative gives us two key images: a metaphorical machine of literal punishment and an island as shadowy as Crusoe's is exacting. Both prove apt figures for the next part of our story.
Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, general European attitudes toward punishment shifted at an official level. This shift— both dramatic and incomplete—centers around the emergence of more exact and self-consciously humane ways of identifying and treating
Figure 7. Penal colony interior, St. Laurent, 1990
The most provocative narration of modern penal history can be found in Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish.[2] In the two decades since its publication this work has both exerted wide and varied influence and encountered furious opposition. A number of scholars across a range of academic disciplines have drawn inspiration from Foucault's genealogical account of modern power, even as more conventional studies of prison history have proliferated. The image of the Panopticon, Bentham's architectural ode to surveillance, has emerged from the dusty closet of history to travel across numerous pages of contemporary academic reference. At the same time some have expressed distaste for the work's fundamental interrogation of humanism, and others have questioned the historical fabric of its specific chronology, arguing for either more gradual or
Here I accept the broad frame of Foucault's historical panorama, yet wish to reposition it against the backdrop of empire. The very specificity of one of its prominent details opens another horizon: beyond Bentham's Panopticon lies Australia, and beyond the modern prison lies the shadow of the penal colony. Although the Panopticon was never built, we should not forget that its inventor championed his project in opposition to a very real British experiment, the practice of penal transportation to the Pacific. And the penal colony was to remain a viable alternative to the penitentiary, not only in nineteenth-century Britain, but also in twentieth-century France (not to mention—in a somewhat different form—the Soviet Union). Even as techniques of confinement, isolation, and regulation grew refined in Metropolitan prison architecture, cruder structures of punishment took shape on the periphery. Foucault's analysis offers no direct space in which to locate them. Discipline and Punish makes only brief references to deportation as an alternative to the prison, calling the French case a “rigorous and distant form of imprisonment” and noting that it did little for the colonial enterprise and was of no real economic importance in either New Caledonia or Guiana.[4] But what might it mean to have a rigorous and distant form of imprisonment, located in a colony and continuing until the mid–twentieth century? To answer this we must turn from the bright light of the Panopticon and search in its shadows, for another, less perfect machine.
BENTHAM'S PANOPTICON
AND BRITISH TRANSPORTATION
Morals reformed—health preserved—industry invigorated—instruction diffused—public burthens lightened—Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock—the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied—all by a simple idea of Architecture!
Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon, or The Inspection House, 1791
An unexplored continent would become a jail. The space around it, the very sea and air, the whole transparent labyrinth of the South Pacific, would become a wall 14,000 miles thick.
Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 1986
The practice of transportation did not emerge out of thin air. The penal colony has antecedents on the one hand in practices of slavery and forced labor in galleys, mines, and public works, and on the other in traditions of exile for political figures, nobles, and other members of fallen elites. Before being applied to penal colonies, the French term bagne was applied successively to those sentenced to rowing Mediterranean galleys and to performing hard labor in Metropolitan ports.[5] But the marriage of both labor and exile in the systematized deportation of large numbers of common criminals to New World settlements marks an extreme twist in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. In a world shaped by economic reordering, imperial expansion, and increasing bureaucratization, the transportation of common criminals away from Europe became a viable penal strategy, an alternative to execution and local prisons that would be formulated and practiced by more than one nation.
Indeed the stories of both the penitentiary and the penal colony are inextricably woven between national histories and empires. At the very least, any serious discussion must encompass Britain, France, and the United States, as varying currents of reform and counterreform ran across both the Channel and the Atlantic. Both Britain and France sought to rid themselves of malefactors by banishing them to the New World, whereas the fields of religious experimentation in the newly independent United States allowed for practical implementation of reform projects. These model prisons in turn—particularly those of Philadelphia and Auburn—enjoyed considerable influence in both British and French debates.[6] But it was in Britain that the organizational outlines of penal transportation took shape and came into conflict with the emerging penitentiary. The British context, therefore, merits closer examination.
The use of prison sentences as a sanction for legal transgression was rarely applied to offenders in England before the late eighteenth century. Instead, punishment more commonly took the form of hanging, whipping, or other physical abuse or transportation overseas. Faced with a growing and unpoliced population of petty criminals and political rebels, the British government found a solution to domestic problems by transferring criminals to the colonies in North America and the Caribbean. The scale of the operation was modest, something on the order of seven hundred felons a year in the mid–eighteenth century. Faced with the independence of the former American colonies, which eliminated their future utility as a penal repository, the British sought
In all some 160,000 convicts were to make the Australian voyage into exile before the last ship pulled ashore in 1868. However, they did not come all at once, or under the same conditions. The bulk arrived between 1810 and 1840, after which transportation to the territory of New South Wales ceased. Following that point, convicts were redirected to marginal zones of the Australian colonial map, Van Dieman's Land (Tasmania), and finally Western Australia. These facts are important to recall when considering the rise and fall of voices urging reform of the system, for they remind us that the possibility of the penitentiary did not simply eliminate the penal colony and that the penal colony did not represent a singular or uniform effort of colonization. Rather, penal colony and penitentiary coexisted in uneasy competition, as did convict and free projects of colonization, and the demise of the latter was gradual and spatially defined.[7]
The system of transportation had numerous critics, many associated with the reforms that gave rise to the penitentiary. Although earlier precedents exist, the decade of the 1770s marks the first watershed of the English reform movement, including the publication of John Howard's influential survey, The State of the Prisons, in 1777 and the passage of Blackstone and Eden's Penitentiary Act in 1779.[8] During the ensuing decades, issues related to the proper forms of punishment occupied a significant place in British public debates, and one of the most prominent figures amid these discussions was Jeremy Bentham. A year after Howard's work, Bentham published a response to a draft version of Blackstone and Eden's bill. Bentham sought to eliminate elements of irrationality from systems of punishment, suggesting, among other things, a whipping machine that would eliminate variability in the force of the blows. Following a trip to visit his brother in Russia, he came up with the outlines of his most influential proposition of all, the system of total surveillance entitled the Panopticon, at about the same time as he learned of the decision to reestablish transportation to Botany Bay. Returning to England in 1788—even as the First Fleet anchored off the barren Australian coast—Bentham set out on a long endeavor to convince a government to build his proposed penitentiary, approaching the Irish and French as well as the English administrations. Setting forth his
Bentham's struggle to convince the British government to build the Panopticon continued for two decades, almost achieving success before he admitted defeat in 1813 and finally received compensation for losses incurred. Throughout the effort he argued strenuously against transportation and the choice of Botany Bay, on the basis of both principle and economy. An opponent of colonies in general, he thought that New South Wales represented a too costly, too distant, and unexemplary form of punishment, far inferior to the penitentiary on every account, views he set forth in an appeal to the home secretary, Lord Pelham, circulated in 1802.[10] But Bentham's protest would not yet win the day; support for transportation ran strong. As he expressed in disgust: “Ask if the Colony presents any prospect of paying its own expenses—oh, but it is an engine of punishment, to be substituted for the Hulks—Ask whether as an engine of punishment it is not an expensive one—oh, but it is a colony to boot, and a fifth quarter of the globe added to the British empire.”[11] This double logic supporting a combination of transportation, empire, and punishment continued to underwrite the Australian venture through the mid–nineteenth century. Although the penal colony encountered criticism for being too lenient as well as too harsh, it was the latter charge, coupled with the overflow of arguments against slavery and combined with the shifting economic structure of the penal apparatus, that finally led to its eventual decline.[12] Yet before it faded away the Australian system made a lasting impression and echoed across the English channel, where French officials sought solutions for their own dilemmas of crime.
THE MODEL OF AUSTRALIA:
ANGLO INFLUENCE AND FRENCH PROPOSALS
Australia is the penal colony that we can cite as a model, by reason of its choice of locale, the efforts which prepared its colonization and the success that crowns it each day.
French colonial official, 1845[13]
Although the French matched the British in early uses of deporting political undesirables and banishing criminals overseas, they developed penal colonies relatively late. In part this can be attributed to the differing fortunes of each empire as well as the differing composition of each national system of punishment. On the one hand the French government could not match Britain's imperial sweep following 1763, while on the other they had a functioning police force and the penal tradition of the bagne to help absorb malefactors. Furthermore, the upheaval associated with the French Revolution complicated questions of punishment directly at the center of national government, unlike the effects of the American Revolution on Britain. Yet it would be a mistake to think that interest in the penal colony ran low. Glowing references to Australia and proposals to establish an overseas prison appeared frequently during the first half of the nineteenth century.[14]
The first serious proposals to establish a “French Botany Bay,” as one later author would put it, surfaced during the revolutionary period. The French Revolution brought a new penal code and opened the door to innovation in punishment, including the adoption of the guillotine in 1792, that infamous scientific advance in the art of decapitation. Debates began over the possibility of establishing a colony based on penal transportation or political deportation, and pamphlets appeared urging the adoption of the scheme, including one supporting the suitability of French Guiana for such a project because the “eternal springtime” of its climate would permit the realization of Plato's republic.[15] While other sites merited consideration—Corsica was also advanced for being underpopulated and underdeveloped—French Guiana emerged as an early favorite for the placement of a French penal colony.
In 1791 a doctor and naturalist named Leblond, who had been searching Guyane for quinine at the behest of Louis XVI, found himself deported from Cayenne back to France. There he did his best to counter the negative image of the colony left by the disastrous Kourou expedition, and he gave a speech proposing to solve urban misery by shipping indigents to work the rich tropical soil. Leblond's efforts were matched by those of Daniel Lescallier, who had likewise served in French Guiana, and who in the same year authored a work entitled “Exposé des moyens de mettre en valeur la Guyane française” (Exposition of the means by which to develop French Guiana). In it he points to the example the British have set in exporting offenders to the
The schemes put forward by Leblond and Lescallier came to rest in the same administrative limbo as the Panopticon, but the French Assembly was intrigued enough in 1792 to designate French Guiana as the site of deportation for priests who refused to accept state supremacy. The following year the Convention wistfully considered Madagascar as a site for the removal of beggars and vagrants, but because the British blocked the way the plan came to naught. Under the Directory, political exiles finally set sail for French Guiana in 1795. In addition to geopolitical realism, the naturalist urges of one of the directors and an effort to import the bread tree to the region may have contributed to the final choice of destination. Deportations continued through the rule of the Directory and into that of Napoleon. The total number of deportees was small—under seven hundred—but the experience left a bad taste; over half of the exiles died, and those who survived gave damning accounts of their suffering. In addition, the experiment was of little use in developing the colony, which was already disrupted by the temporary suspension of slavery. When the Portuguese government in exile in Brazil occupied French Guiana with English assistance in 1809, this first phase of deportation came to an end.[17]
The idea of a French penal colony, however, did not die. Indeed, the period between the restoration of the monarchy and the return of revolution in 1848 overflows with proposals on prisons and punishments. As recidivism came to be recognized as a social problem, religious reformist influence came again to the fore, and the prison became the standard of punishment.[18] Amid these writings, proposals related to transportation were well represented. In 1816 we find a lengthy report by a prominent bureaucrat, M. Forestier, entitled “Memoire sur le choix d'un lieu de déportation” (Memorandum on the choice of a site for deportation).[19] The report takes the basic logic of the transportation but frees it from a predetermined locale, seeking instead to establish the proper rational criteria with which to choose a penal depot. Therefore we will look at it more closely. Opening with a citation of the
Justice, which in centuries of ignorance always displayed itself armed with glory, has yielded before the voice of policy and humanity; a more just proportion has been established between trespasses and punishments, and society has become aware of how to make use of criminals expelled from its bosom. Thus it is that in almost all States, capital punishment is today reserved for serious offenders. England has given this system further development. Almost all crimes that entail the death penalty are punished by deportation. An immense continent offers the convicts a new homeland, a new existence, hopes of fortune and the prospect of forgiveness. And at the same time that this power spares and increases a population too small for its needs and its projects, it imparts movement to capital, as equally advantageous to private industry as to public fortune …. It is thus evident that it is necessary to follow the example of England and to found a colony based on deportation. Justice, ethics, and policy clamor for its establishment, and when so many interests tend toward the same goal, one must hasten to satisfy them.
Having adopted this principle, the question becomes one of how best to choose a site for this “colony based on deportation.” In addition to “a healthy climate and a fertile ground,” an algorithm of distance is crucial: the successful colony must be not too close, but also not too far, and represent a distinct settlement of its own. It requires:
A proximity great enough so that the expense of transportation of convicts and things useful to their establishment is not excessive, and yet a removal considerable enough to create an obstacle, not only to their return, but also to communications with them, of which facility and frequency would not be without danger. A place circumscribed, isolated, distanced from [civil] colonial establishments, be they national or foreign, where the deported might find ways of escape or the opportunity to create turmoil, the seed of which already exists in the New World.
Next the report surveys possibilities within the diminished French Empire: French Guiana, Senegal, and the island of Madagascar, all of which had been long designated “in public opinion” as proper places for penal colonies. The respective advantages and disadvantages of each potential site are weighed. French Guiana offers fertile soil and a rich forest, but the climate is deadly to Europeans, and they are incapable of either hard labor or reproduction under “the fires of the equator.” Furthermore, its open continental boundaries offer the possibility of escape, and the effect of white convicts on the racial hierarchy of the already established slave colony would prove disastrous:
This spectacle can only weaken the conception of the superiority of the European race that is so important to maintain among slaves …. The colony of Guyane includes but a very small number of whites compared to blacks and mulattos. This multitude is contained only by the prestige of color; but if agitated by unruly men, for whom disorder is a necessity, what will become of this moral force? … Guyane will become the theater of the misfortunes and crimes that entailed the loss of Saint-Domingue [Haiti].
Senegal receives an equally negative rating, promising to turn into “a vast tomb” for Europeans, and while the author deems Madagascar the best option at this point, French control of the island remains uncertain. The British Empire represents an impressive and threatening competitor (“When one casts an eye on the map of the globe, one is frightened at the aspect of the multiplicity and extension of lands submissive to Great Britain”), but it serves also as a model for the organization of the future colony, which must not treat its constituents too harshly and threaten their survival (“In all cases, the government has to appear generous relative to the colonists, rather than to abandon them too abruptly to their own resources”).
The central themes of this 1816 memorandum find repetition in many subsequent documents. A decade later the allusion to the British model became most clear in a project entitled “Le Botany-Bay Français.” Expressing concern that the “century of civilization” would succumb to such errors as “modern philosophy, dogmas of the revolution, materialism, and indifference to religious matters,” the author suggests consulting the legislation that produced British Australia and Russian Siberia to better understand the virtues of exile.[20] Running through the list of available French colonies, he regrets that France—“expropriated” by Britain—retains so few. Dismissing Martinique and Guadeloupe, on the grounds that their soil has been exhausted by cultivation, and “ungrateful” Senegal, with its sandy soil and fearsome sun, he turns to French Guiana as the proper location for France's Australia:
Here, without contradiction, is virgin soil that calls for the arms of man, the propitious place where France must send its guilty and perverse children to make them industrious and upright men …. Guyane will be for France what New South Wales is for England; our colony will become like Sydney: citizen colonists and planters will derive great advantage from these slaves of the law.
He notes that similar proposals had met with local opposition (“quite justly”—who would want to live next to convicts?), but this could be solved by carefully separating the penal establishment from the plantation
The white caste clings most singularly to the nobility of the epidermis; it cannot consent to place before eyes of a Negro a tableau of the degradation of a white …. If ever a Negro slave and rebel reproached his master, … [t]he colonist could not support this humiliation; the whip would fall from his hands. How much he himself would change color, if a man of color, free and crafty, pleased to show him at every turn his fellow [white] men chained and degraded! … A bad joke would suggest that we dye our convicts black before embarking them, seeing no middle course between an opinion so inherent to the country, and the necessity of colonizing it with our criminals. But no, the enlightened portion of the French residing in Cayenne will understand that the projected measure is of major interest; that it concerns nothing less than the repose of families and the morality of a nation of brothers, and that the small interests of self-esteem cannot stand in the way of such a great object. In addition, thanks to the abolition of the slave trade [1815 in France], these demarcations of vanity will diminish with time.
Such optimism proved premature; the penal colony remained in gestation, and the prejudice of race remained, as yet, unchallenged by the sight of white “slaves.”
However, the debates continued, with questions related to the appropriateness of sending Europeans to work in French Guiana never far from their center. In 1826 a frigate received secret orders to scout the area between the Oyapock and Amazon rivers (then still claimed by France), seeking an equatorial Sydney. In contrast, an 1827 report on the English experiment rules out the slave-holding Antilles, favoring a project in the South Pacific.[21] At the same time, difficulties in obtaining an adequate labor supply after the suppression of the slave trade began to undermine objections to sending Europeans to a plantation colony. Noting the lack of legal means to increase slave numbers, a letter from the governor of French Guiana in September 1828 wondered “if the employment of a certain number of white convicts would be suitable to the cultivation of our land, without clashing too obviously with our colonial system.”[22]
Under the new regime of Louis-Philippe in the 1830s, the discussion of issues related to prison reform expanded, and in the ensuing decade they came to a head. A lengthy debate pitted reformers who favored adopting cellular prisons (led by Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, deeply influenced by their American sojourn) against those who wished to revive transportation and others who defended
The political turmoil of 1848 would prove decisive in the history of the French penal colony. The upheaval in June produced some twelve thousand political prisoners for the regime to process, and the decision was eventually taken to provide for deportation to a “fortified enclosure” outside continental France. Although initially banned from the Mediterranean, the majority of these prisoners ended up there, while the government debated the merits of other sites, including the familiar options of Madagascar and Senegal as well as the arctic Kerguelen Islands. The list of proposals covering the Atlantic was truly remarkable, ranging beyond the standby, French Guiana, to the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, St. Pierre and Miquelon, and even Texas. The Pacific won the dubious distinction of welcoming this round of exiles when a handful of deportees headed for the newly annexed Marquesas Islands in 1850.[24]
Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the republic, threw his weight behind the reform of the bagnes and the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive and more human, by using it to advance French colonization.”[25] The movement in favor of transportation grew steadily, and a legislative commission proposed Africa as a suitable dumping ground. Then Louis-Napoleon's coup d’état reworked the political ground yet again and created another twenty-seven thousand or so political detainees. About ten thousand of them were deported to Algeria. Freed from the necessity of negotiating between factions, the emperor-to-be added French Guiana as a site of deportation by decree and prepared to ship the most dangerous agitators
The emperor wasted no time waiting for legislative approval of the choice. He announced an experiment by decree: convicts from the bagnes could volunteer to transfer to French Guiana, where, it was suggested, they would be able to work free of the chain gang and even marry. The response was gratifying: some three thousand bagnards expressed interest. The majority of them arrived in French Guiana before the end of the year. Meanwhile, a second commission headed by Rudel du Miral seconded Louis-Napoleon's proposal to close the bagnes and send their inmates to Guyane. The legislative debate focused more on the need to set a terrible example for evildoers than the need to reform or moralize them, and the motion passed overwhelmingly. The law establishing the conditions of penal transportation was ratified on May 30, 1854. One by one the Metropolitan bagnes closed—Rochefort in 1852, Brest in 1858, and Toulon in 1873. Their name, along with their constituents, moved across the ocean; as steam replaced sail in Metropolitan ports, further reducing the need for the raw, unskilled labor that had once powered galleys, a new bagne formed in the colonies. The era of the French penal colony was now open; the new French Empire had begun its Botany Bay, even as the British original wound to a close.[27]
COLONIAL LOGIC AND PENAL TRANSPORTATION
When then will France cure itself of the mania of wanting to copy England? We have nothing to learn from that country in matters of moralization. Instead of copying its so-called reforms, let us propose models for its imitation, as we did when we inaugurated the regime of overseas transportation, for all that it had been abandoned by England. Our neighbors will not delay to follow our example.
Catholic newspaper, 1857[28]
Here I will pause for a minute and review the evidence before us. The idea of the penal colony flickers through prison debates in France from the revolution onward but only bursts into full flame in the mid–nineteenth century. Planning and discussion consciously takes Australia for its central model and frequently refers to the need to transport common criminals, but action is spurred primarily by a wave of political arrests, both in the experiment with deportation during the revolution and the founding of the new overseas system under the Second Republic and empire. Unlike the British case, the French penal colony grows less from criminal pressure and more from sudden political upheaval. The bagnes—marginal spaces on the edge of the nation, holding its “desperate” refuse—linger on, resisting reform until they finally yield to colonial transportation.
The double logic of the British system also drives the French imagination; proposals alternatively concentrate on a desire to punish criminals and rid the Metropole of their presence, on the one hand, and a hope of furthering the work of colonial expansion and economic progress, on the other. Within this logic the focus shifts between the need to colonize, the need to punish, and the need to reform, depending on context and the position of the author. Unlike the penitentiary, the penal colony is not a clear instrument of reason in punishment, neatly aligned with movements for reform. Yet it would be a mistake to discount the degree of possible reform envisioned for this colonial experiment.[29] Rather than a conservative punishment, the penal colony constitutes a hybrid, awkward development, part machine and part beast. It represents a kind of reform, a kind of modern punishment, but one that also reflects repression and the legacy of spectacle at a colonial distance. In the case of France, it shimmers with colonial fantasy, allowing future Australias to emerge on tropical horizons.
Here we come to an important point: unlike the penitentiary, the penal colony requires location. The specificity of the site matters; it is the very place that is to enact punishment and reform while itself undergoing transformation. The penal colony is in essence a geographic technique, deploying instruments of distance and density. By definition it should be at a remove, and relatively open, a separate clearing into which the crime of the center can flow. In discussing the choice of location for such an experiment, the various documents make clear these basic parameters. They describe additional criteria less uniformly: the need to prevent escapes (a logic that favors islands), the need to restrict communication (a logic that favors distance), the need to control costs
Amid these discussions French Guiana plays a key, if ambiguous, role. Frequently it is the favored choice, yet always with qualifications and controversy. Past experience (primarily the ill-fated Kourou expedition and deportations during the revolutionary period) dictates caution, but openness invites speculation. The land is particularly alluring because of its perceived natural wealth, yet particularly threatening because of its perceived inappropriateness for Europeans. Its status prior to 1848 as a plantation slave colony brings questions of race tightly into focus. Thus the choice of French Guiana is never clean; for every approval there is a disavowal. In 1841 we find another suggestion that French Guiana really would be appropriate, while eight years later Journal de la Marine preferred Tahiti, where Europeans, it was said, could work even in full sunlight.[30] Even when the Mackau commission settles on Guyane, a number of commission members dissent in favor of the South Pacific.
Beyond potential conflicts of interest for some authors opposed to French Guiana's selection, we should also note their persistent reliance on a climatic theory of race. A letter from a former attorney general and governor of French Guiana to the Mackau commission typifies this viewpoint. Urging them not to place the penal colony there, he appends the text of a speech he had delivered six years earlier on the subject of penal colonization. Fully convinced of the appropriateness of Australia as a model, he stands by his racial reasoning, the intervening abolition of slavery notwithstanding. He believes that, amid the geographic criteria governing the selection of a penal colony, climate reigns supreme: “To transport convicts from a cold country to the torrid zone and there set them to hard labor would be to send them to a certain death.”[31]
This principle of racial geography was about to be put to the test. The sudden end of slavery in 1848 removed the central objection to the placement of a penal colony in French Guiana: that it would corrupt the essential nineteenth-century racial code of master-slave relations by demonstrating that men with white skin could be subordinate and perform manual labor. Thus while the abolition of slavery may have hastened the end of Australian transportation, it contributed to the emergence of the French penal colony. Even as the emancipation of plantation slaves threw French Guiana into turmoil, a new bureaucratic entity and a new class of indentured Europeans appeared on its shores.
RUNNING A PENAL COLONY
“It's a remarkable piece of apparatus,” said the officer to the explorer.
Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919
When the first shipment of convicts pulled into Cayenne in 1852, they received a warm welcome. The governor gave a speech promising a bright future, holding forth the lure of rural civil redemption:
My friends, there is no more beautiful or richer country under the sun than this one. It is yours. The Prince Louis-Napoleon sends me to share it out among you. You will disembark, work, prepare the ground, construct cabins. During that time, I will cover the colony. I will choose plots in the most charming sites, the most fertile cantons; then these lands cultivated in common will be shared among the most deserving.[32]
In the interim it was decided to select the Iles du Salut—the same “Islands of Salvation” where the remnants of the Kourou expedition had fled in fear of disease—for the first penal installations. The convicts set to work clearing the ground and building housing.
By all accounts they worked with some efficiency, and a modicum of eagerness. As one official effusively wrote the minister of the navy in June:
The convicts, filled with the warmest sense of debt to the government, have asked me how they could demonstrate their sentiment at this time. They are going to raise a column on the plateau of Ile Royale on which one can read the following inscription: “To repent, that is Salvation. To Louis-Napoleon, President of the French Republic, to Théodore Ducos, Minister of the Navy.”[33]
For all the excess of such official enthusiasm, for all that the legislature may have argued for repression, for all that the political detainees may not have shared in any adulation of Louis Bonaparte (who was, however, remarkably popular in the national plebiscites of the era), we should not miss this moment of optimism amid the irony of later events. Imagine the first impression. Freed from the gloomy bagnes of France, released from the holds of ships after an Atlantic crossing, the convicts emerge, blinking, into bright tropical light. They are told that land will be theirs, that redemption is possible, and they are given immediate, concretely meaningful tasks. Around them the world is still in turmoil: a new Napoleon rules in Paris, slavery has ended, and the earlier plantation system lies in shambles. Few of them have traveled before this trip, few of them know much about Guyane beyond rumor. Armed with the unstoppable ardor of amnesia, the actors of the new drama, convicts and officials alike, can succumb to initial enthusiasm. For these first arrivals are, in their small, desperate way, volunteers.
Back in France the experiment continued to incite interest from more than one direction. Rumors flowed across the Atlantic, varying widely in perspective and detail. The apparent enthusiasm of the convicts upset those who wished transportation to be a fearsome penalty: “If things happen as is said, if convicts go to French Guiana as if they were going to the promised land … justice is sacrificed to philanthropy.”[34] At the same time philanthropists and relatives of the convicts worried about potential terrors of the jungle. A publication in the French West Indies hastened to defend the region from popular misconceptions, claiming the climate of Cayenne to be “one of the mildest of the world,” noting that fevers could be cured with the timely application of quinine, that snakes were actually rare, and that “at the slightest noise even tigers themselves flee before man.”[35] Thus the removal of the bagnards to French Guiana, the article went on to stress, did not represent some plot of premeditated execution on the part of the government. Subsequent events, however, were to belie this optimistic realism, and the opponents of penal paradise would soon have little reason for complaint.
Because the Iles du Salut were of quite limited size and the flow of convicts from France continued unabated, the first installations could only serve as a temporary depot. In any case, to complete the reformatory vision of criminals transformed into an agricultural labor force, suitable locations had to be found on the mainland. The first of these was located to the southeast of Cayenne near the mouth of the Oyapock
The death rates were not only startling but also carefully recorded. While some have suggested that official estimates are actually low, they were more than high enough to cause alarm and sat uncomfortably on the pages of official reports. Indeed, the documents of the day are full of statistics, mournful scorecards of survival. The budget of 1855, for example, notes that by the end of November 1853 a full 549 out of the 3,038 so far transported were dead, calculating a rate of 18 percent over nineteen months of activity, or 11 percent a year.[37] These figures did not pass unnoticed; they constituted a central topic of discussion between officials of the nascent penal colony and its parent ministry in Paris. For all that the legislation shifting the bagnes overseas may have intended the experience to be severe, reformatory conscience and the colonizing impulse objected to wholesale liquidation of prisoners. As the minister of the navy and the colonies wrote to French Guiana's governor in December 1854: “The figure of twenty-six dead for the month of November is quite rightly pointed out by you as a significant improvement relative to the situation last year, but not yet constituting a satisfactory proportion. The number of sick lends still further support to this observation.”[38] He went on to express hope that shifting of the installation at Montagne d'Argent to “healthier” ground would improve conditions there. Unfortunately it did not. All told some eight thousand convicts crossed the Atlantic in the first five years of French transportation. As 1857 dawned the prison population was still only at thirty-six hundred; of the eight thousand transported bodies, half lay in tropical graves.[39]
The authorities experimented repeatedly, opening installations in new locations and shifting prisoners between them. They tried acclimating new arrivals through an intermediary stay on the islands, where death rates were generally lower. Echoing objections raised in the debates leading to the selection of French Guiana, a number of officials became convinced that European convicts were incapable of performing
Yet the vast majority of convicts were of European rather than of colonial origin, and the central experiment of penal colonization revolved around the question of what to do with them. A shifting array of administrators reshuffled plans and operations. Installations were opened and—eventually, after long delays—closed. The most significant, St. Laurent, was located on the border with Dutch Guiana near the mouth of the Maroni River. Interest in the Maroni region stemmed in part from French observation of the Dutch settlement of Albina on the opposite bank. Inspired by this European success, an experiment involving a dozen white and a dozen black prisoners began in 1857. The convicts built a settlement on land previously occupied by an Amerindian village, preparing the way for the opening of a major settlement two years later. In 1860 a decree separated the surrounding territory from the rest of the colony, reserving it exclusively for penal use.[42]
It was at St. Laurent that the next step in plans to further colonization unfolded: women prisoners were imported, in hopes of fostering the emergence of convict families and consequently the growth of Guyane's population. In 1859 a first shipment of thirty-six women arrived. The beginning of the experiment was inauspicious; nearly a third died in the first six months. In all some nine hundred other women would eventually follow them there over the next half century. Although many of these bagnardes did marry, they failed to produce the anticipated offspring, and the dream of convict families multiplying into a full settler colony along the lines of Australia never came to pass.[43]
Similarly, the agricultural settlements failed to produce much of anything, let alone a landscape of reformed small farmers. Some of this failure can be attributed to the excessive levels of death and disease, and some to inefficient and inconsistent administration, for while efforts at colonization grimly carried on, the direction of the operation passed from hand to hand. All told, French Guiana was to have seventyeight governors in seventy-seven years.[44] Work remained a central concern of the penal colony, touted for both its moralizing influence and its crucial role in the project of colonization. But the work carried out in French Guiana produced little of lasting value. Rather, the experiment proved a most efficient mechanism by which to quietly eliminate criminals far from home. By 1866 the penal colony had registered a total of 17,017 convicts, including 594 of colonial origin, 329 political prisoners, and 212 women. Out of this total 6,809 (40 percent) were dead, mostly from disease, 809 (4.8 percent) had escaped or disappeared, 1,770 (10.4 percent) had been allowed to return to France, and just 166 (1 percent) remained “voluntarily” in French Guiana, in addition to the active penal population of 7,466.[45] The real industry of the equatorial penal colony, it began to be clear, was imperfect death.
Local reaction to the displacement of the bagne in Guyane remained mixed. While some still held out hopes that it might prove the key to the expansion of the colony, others opposed the arrival of criminals in their immediate vicinity. A number of pleas and recommendations arrived at the Parisian ministry, including an 1862 article in a French economics publication (written by a resident of Cayenne under a pseudonym) that charged the penal administration with mismanagement.[46] The feelings of the less literate surface more rarely, but we can bear witness to a partial example: in 1856 residents of the town of Kourou sent a petition to Louis-Napoleon, protesting the selection of their district for a penal installation. Assuring their ruler that they were not against the “principle of transportation,” they worried about what would become of their community of small farmers, threatened by the arrival of convicts: “We only protest today, Sire, against the arbitrary processes by which we are obliged to either take our risks and live in peril amid the prison population, or to abandon our lands without any remuneration, which would be the equivalent of complete ruin, or expatriation, for those few whose means still allow them the possibility!”[47] What they hoped for was “just and large” compensation, particularly if Kourou was destined to become the principal seat of transportation. On this occasion the eye of Paris focused elsewhere; Kourou remained a secondary installation of the bagne, significant enough to disrupt,
A COLONIAL RIVAL: THE OPTION OF NEW CALEDONIA
In New Caledonia we have committed an anachronism 150 years in advance on our period; in Guyane the anachronism is no less appreciable, but in the inverse direction.
Military officer analyzing the French penal colonies, 1868[48]
By 1857, even the emperor himself began to admit that the Guiana project was in trouble and that perhaps another site would prove more auspicious. Just after the original decision to open the overseas bagne, France had annexed the Pacific island of New Caledonia, the close second choice of the Mackau commission. Now that island beckoned again. The government dispatched a trial shipment of three hundred convicts and, when they seemed to do well, followed them with another in 1864. Meanwhile, conditions in French Guiana continued to be unsatisfactory with regard to either moralization or colonization. In 1867 the government announced that henceforth New Caledonia would serve as the repository for bagnards of European origin, while those from the colonies would continue to arrive in French Guiana. The racial logic was now sanctioned; white men required less severe conditions, such as in the “milder” tropics of New Caledonia. Those already in French Guiana would remain, but in the future only colonials would arrive to replace them.[49]
Here we have a clear turning point in the history of the penal colony: an official admission that the original rehabilitory project of colonial labor required modification and that the geographic calculus involved must be altered to account for race. A technical shift in administration might allow the apparatus of transportation to continue to promise something beyond sheer repression. Distinctions between kinds of humans would allow for a more humane—if severe—punishment. The dream of a French Australia would be transferred to an island lying off the coast of that very continent, while French Guiana would be reserved for those of more tropical origin. The move to
Yet the reform potential of the penal colony lingered in the minds of visionaries. One lengthy report sent to the minister by a military officer in 1864 still argued that the problem with the French Guiana project lay not in concept but in application—the “flourishing” and “opulent” success of British efforts proved as much. Rather than continue to treat the bagnards as exiled lepers, a new concentration on the moral and colonial dimensions of the project was in order through productive labor; as a concrete beginning, the report urged that the penal colony be placed under the direction of an agricultural engineer.[50] In 1868 an infantry officer serving in Saigon submitted an elaborate proposal to the emperor's office, which subsequently forwarded the document to the ministry of the navy. Entitled “Un Pénitencier doit être une véritable maison de santé morale” (A penitentiary must be a veritable house of moral health), the tract reviews the record of the French Guiana experiment and details recommended reforms based on the author's thirteen years of experience with a disciplinary battalion in Algeria and Senegal. Ascribing the failure in French Guiana to climatic limits of race and poor administration, the author suggests that a tropical penal colony is simultaneously a geographic and anthropological enterprise: “not only a question of modifying the ground, but indeed even the nature of man, and that is the work of generations.”[51] In his view New Caledonia holds more promise as a site of transportation. However, he objects to what he sees as overly lax administration in the Pacific bagne. Expiation must come before rehabilitation, this colonial officer believes, to ensure “moral health.” The key to success—yet again—is to be found in work and the proper organization of the convicts. Most intriguingly, the author includes a careful rendering of a layout of his ideal penal establishment: a cross composed of four barracks, with a guardhouse in the middle, gunsights trained along the axes. In the distant heat of Southeast Asia, amid discussions shifting over several seas, appears a tiny, colonial reflection of the Panopticon.
THE AUSTRALIAN MODEL: LOOKING BACKWARD
The opening of a French penal colony in the Pacific marked a period of limbo for the French Guiana bagne but did not put an end to either it or comparisons with Australia. An authorless draft of a report written
The idea of colonizing a country situated at the equator with the European workers would perhaps have been excusable two hundred years ago; it cannot be in our century. This senseless project, undertaken blindly, without reflection, and as if by surprise, in the aftermath of the coup d'etat of December second, has continued for thirty years, with a completely French ignorance of all things colonial. Theory and experience have condemned it highly. French Guiana was not a new, unknown country; for more than two centuries, the white race had tried at different times to till the soil of this country with its own hands, and every attempt of colonization with white laborers ended with the same disastrous result.
Yet the problems of judgment ran much deeper than geographic ignorance. The flaw of the French project was systemic in nature and hence the failure of the bagne preordained. The French sin lay in misunderstanding an essential English principle—private enterprise—as well as the entire model of penal transportation. Without that understanding, the report maintains, there could be no development:
It has been said, and is still often repeated, that by transporting its convicts France has imitated the example of England. Nothing is more false than this assertion. Between the penal colonization system of the English and our own lies an immense difference. England told its convicts: “You have broken the social pact on which rests all civilized society; you have all gravely infringed the penal code; my duty is to shelter myself from your attacks. I do not want you consuming in a prison without producing. I condemn you to work …. Here is a new country, situated outside the tropics. Scientific consideration provides certainty that the European can live and work there. It is there that I am going to send you; through work you will be able to create for yourself there a place in the sun that you lack on the soil of old England. Do not forget, however, that you will have to count far more on yourself than on me. There already exists a New England of America; it is for you to work, to struggle, and to create here an Australian New England.” A century has not yet passed since the day when Philip disembarked his convicts at Port Jackson, and the New England of the south exists today. It possesses cities that can be compared with more than one capital of Europe, and that have already their universal exhibitions …. To imitate England, France told its transportees: “It no longer suits me to maintain the national workshops in
Here, encapsulated in the language of personified states, we find a contrast between generational independence imagined in the British Empire and paternalistic dependence fostered by the French: where England made its erring children into men, the metaphor goes, France kept them permanently infantile. The model of Australia has become less a vision of the future than a template against which to judge the past; where England matched the proper system to the proper place and found prosperity, France misunderstood that system and misapplied it in an inappropriate setting. Of course the result was doomed, and only decay could ensue, never development. Nature, unchallenged by industrious culture, would take back its own.
THE PENAL COLONY AS PUNISHMENT
All my books … are little toolboxes, if you will. If people are willing to open them and make use of such and such a sentence or idea, of one analysis or another, as they would a screwdriver or a monkey wrench, in order to short circuit or disqualify systems of power, including even possibly the ones my books came out of, well, all the better.
Michel Foucault, 1975[53]
Let us return now to the Metropolitan clarity of the Panopticon and Foucault's suggestive, offhand dismissal of the penal colony as a “rigorous and distant form of imprisonment.” Distant, yes, crucially over
Carrying this thesis a step further we might ask if the penal colony represents an anachronism, a backward eddy in the flow of modern punishment.[54] Transportation certainly had close ancestors in chain gangs, convict labor on public works, and the isolation of lepers—all practices that Foucault places in his earlier, floating category of punishment. The prisoners endured physical abuse, and their fate was to some degree public, at least in Guiana. But the penal colony also displays traits of disciplinary control similar to the penitentiary. The prisoners found themselves distanced and confined, effectively hidden from Metropolitan France. Disciplinary infractions were primarily punished with isolation. On at least some level, the bagne was expected to rehabilitate its bagnards, and they to rehabilitate themselves. And yet they were also deported and expected to spend their lives in a colony.
The frame before us wavers slightly: unlike the clear view from the center, the edge remains dim; unlike the consistent blueprint of the Panopticon, the penal colony blurs within its own form. The lines between empires, between geographic zones, between reform and repression cross and recross. The bagne is many things at once, always at a remove. It is punishment, yes, but it is also colonial, and its modern status remains shadowy and suspect. Like the fantastic machine in Kafka's short story, the French penal colony lost its claim to the very reason out of which it was born, becoming an impure, inefficient apparatus of torture and elimination. The sentences it wrote transformed; in place of ideal calls to moral and economic advancement, we find raw, physical marks of suffering.