4. The Natural Prison
I was a Prisoner lock'd up with the Eternal Bars and Bolts of the Ocean, in an Uninhabited Wilderness, without Redemption.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719
In the spring of 1895, the prison transport ship St. Nazaire deposited a newly disgraced French army officer on a small and rocky tropical isle. The captain's steps ashore—a minor encounter between foot and land of the sort commonly erased from wider consciousness—would lead to a potent symbolic moment within European history: the exile of Dreyfus on Devil's Island. Much has been written about the Dreyfus Affair, his Kafkaesque trials and the subsequent upheaval of the French political landscape. Far less attention has been paid to Dreyfus's actual ordeal of exile; his period of punishment occurs in a dim realm offstage while he awaits his return and eventual redemption.[1] Yet the notoriety of the case, together with its theme of epochal injustice, underscores that—wherever he was sent—he suffered, and suffered as an innocent man. Thus while Dreyfus's deportation was far from typical of the experience of convicts in French Guiana, and the outrage it provoked was not the first incidence of public outcries against the bagne, it nevertheless captures the essential mood pervading accounts of the later penal colony: despair amid the floating terror of distant tropics. Therefore I use it to mark the crucial slide of penal colony from a space of improvement to a space of punishment. Although the later penal colony retained rhetorical trappings of moralization and development, its acknowledged purpose became more clearly punitive. The continued existence of this institution attracted an extraordinary measure of attention and sensationalization in France and beyond, particularly the
Figure 8. Alfred Dreyfus, 1895
FROM PENAL COLONY TO DEVIL'S ISLAND, 1887–1946
The Harrow was not writing, it was only jabbing, and the bed was not turning the body over but only bringing it up quivering against the needles.
Franz Kafka, “In the Penal Colony,” 1919
First we should establish a few significant social facts. When the French reestablished the transportation of European convicts to French Guiana, they did so with full knowledge of its high dangers and death rates.
Thus at the end of the nineteenth century, the penal colony in French Guiana entered a new administrative period. Transportation to New Caledonia ceased in 1897, and the Pacific bagne was subsequently phased out. But despite frequent outcries and sensational reports, the French Guiana penal establishment continued to exist through the end of World War II. Following continuing waves of bad publicity and the election of the Popular Front government in France, a decision was finally made in 1938 to cease transportation and let the Atlantic bagne atrophy. The intervention of the war and the occupation of France complicated and delayed closure until 1946, resulting in a final burst of suffering. Even in ending, this colonial machine remained imperfect and arbitrarily tragic, as the repatriation of convicts continued well after the war.[5]
IN THE BAGNE
For the last half century of its existence, the penal colony constituted a relatively stable social order. To balance its representation, I will quickly survey some of the social facts involved, using as dispassionate a tone as possible. Within the bagne the administration distinguished three classes of bagnards: transportés, convicted under common law;
The largest prison camps in French Guiana, St. Laurent and St. Jean, were on the Maroni River by Suriname, and it was here that the ships deposited newcomers. Following their arrival, the convicts were sorted by type. Many of the transportés stayed in St. Laurent, which had a capacity of about twenty-five hundred, whereas the relégués were primarily sent upriver to work in St. Jean, which held about sixteen hundred. Those considered most “incorrigible,” and those who broke disciplinary rules, were sent either to forest camps deep in the jungle, where they spent their time engaged in backbreaking cutting of wood, or to the Iles du Salut, just off the central coast. On Royale, the largest of the three islands, hard-core convicts lived an isolated yet relatively easy existence. Those who required additional punishment, as well as those who attempted to escape, found themselves in solitary confinement on St. Joseph. Forbidden to talk or smoke, they were allowed little exercise, sunlight, or food, beneath the constant gaze of guards. European déportés— of whom there were never very many—lived on the overly notorious Ile du Diable, or Devil's Island. Like Royale, life on Diable was relatively peaceful, the main punishment being restriction of movement in a highly isolated place. In addition to the Iles du Salut, a prison camp also operated onshore at Kourou, mainly housing convicts at work on Guiana's one and only road. Farther down the coast in the capital town of Cayenne, another contingent of convicts engaged in service labor. At various times there were also forest camps organized on the basis of racial segregation, a camp for those suffering from tuberculosis or other disabilities, and a leper colony near St. Laurent. Until 1903, the small number of women who were transported to Guiana lived in their own camp near St. Laurent, under the supervision
The convict population usually ranged between three thousand and seven thousand and hovered around 20 percent of the total population of French Guiana.[8] Despite the shipment of some seven hundred new arrivals per year, deaths and escapes kept the number of prisoners relatively constant. The average prisoner was Metropolitan, French, nominally Catholic, partly educated, between twenty and fifty years of age, single, and from the lower end of the urban social order. However, this profile masks considerable variation, and the colonies were also well represented, with bagnards from Algeria to Vietnam. The convicts were controlled by trustees and several hundred prison guards of mixed origin, including Corsicans, North Africans, and Guyanais, as well as about six hundred troops, including a detachment of Senegalese.[9]
Conditions of everyday existence ranged from fairly mild to quite severe. The colony was administered under rules established in Paris, often with extreme bureaucratic rigidity. Supplies were frequently stolen for sale on the black market, and petty graft, from bribery to the smuggling of exotic butterflies, constituted a way of life. Convicts were provided with minimal clothing: gray jumpers with red stripes for the transportés and blue ones for the relégués, two shirts, and a hat.[10] The diet was generally poor and frequently inadequate, and the guards, by all accounts, were free to mete out a good deal of physical punishment. For their part, the prisoners engaged in physical violence among themselves, contributing to an atmosphere of tension and domination common to mainland prisons. Rape and abusive homosexual relationships were common, and threats and murders not infrequent. The guards often looked the other way, though prisoners guilty of misconduct could be sentenced to a series of punishments from solitary confinement to the guillotine. Drinking and gambling provided the main source of entertainment. In a reverse hierarchy familiar to prisons, murderers and other violent criminals held higher status than thieves or relégués, and those who succeeded in escaping enjoyed the greatest renown of all. Several possible escape routes existed, the most common being to head northeast into what was then Dutch Guiana, either through the jungle or floating on a raft. Neither method of travel was easy, and many died in the attempt. After the Dutch adopted a policy of extradition the stakes grew even higher, as hopeful escapees had now to reach Brazil, British Guiana, Venezuela, or Trinidad. Still, some 150 a year did succeed.[11]
Upon the completion of their sentence (or the granting of relégué individuel status) the former convicts, known as libérés, were left completely on their own to find employment. They remained under a kind of parole known as doublage, which prevented them from leaving Guiana, either for a length of time equal to their original sentence or for life, and they were threatened with renewed sentences for any infractions. Many found the conditions of liberty as difficult as those of confinement, because employers preferred the free labor of convicts. Local laws forbade the ex-prisoners from selling drinks or working as restaurateurs or entrepreneurs of almost any sort, while at the same time requiring that they be employed. Only after a reformist decree in 1925 did this “reentry” become any easier, and many former convicts still either hovered barely above the threshold of subsistence or returned again to confinement.[12]
Thus equipped with a modicum of synthetic historical sociology, we can turn to consider representation and the lurid suffering that marked the penal colony, from Dreyfus onward. Kafka's story, as we shall see, was not an isolated nightmare.
AN ENGLISH DESCRIPTION OF 1878
“A Visit to One of the Prisons of Cayenne,” published in the London religious journal Good Words in 1878, provides us with an entry prior to Dreyfus and foreshadows much of what would come.[13] Because of its historical location and its content, I will quote it at length. Opening with a historical and geographical sketch in luxuriant prose, it parlays this beginning into a form of social analysis, noting “the fatal malaria which lurks in the soil” and absence of Europeans, on the one hand, and the fact that neighboring colonies in British and Dutch Guiana are productive, on the other:
The colony is going back in the world rather than forward …. The cloves, cinnamon and pepper of Cayenne were once a famous export. The liberation of the slaves killed this ancient prosperity. A few negroes still linger in the overgrown clearing of these large estates; here and there is a convict establishment, a Jesuit mission-church, a camp of gold prospectors; but the great body of the country belongs to the wild beast and the Indian. The people huddle in the town, which is falling into decay; and the finest French possession is still a mere convict settlement, while Demarara and Surinam [British and Dutch Guiana] are thriving colonies, with a large and prosperous white and coloured population. Cayenne is well fit to produce all the usual tropical vegetables—sugar cane, indigo, spices, tobacco, cacao and
Here we have the recurring theme of unfulfilled promise that runs through so much writing about French Guiana, and its awkward position between past and future. The author then goes on to describe his visit to Cayenne in 1875 aboard a telegraph ship charged with connecting the French outpost to the British by submarine cable. After proceeding over “repulsive-looking green seas” to the “savage outline” of the coast, he provides us with a meditation on the landscape before him, rife with romantic excess:
There is a strange allurement in the appearance of these virgin forests of South America, so gloomy, so grand, so lonely. From the deck of the passing ship the voyager is never tired of gazing at the sombre wilds which he may never penetrate, but which hide under their sullen shade so much to excite the imagination. It is not the interest attaching to a land of ancient and faded glory he feels, but to one of brilliant promise; not to a dead land embalmed in the pages of history, but to a free and unknown wilderness fresh from the hands of Nature. Even these mountains of Guiana, all muffled as they were in fog, these dull shaggy forests soaking with wet, had some of the poetry of a savage wilderness for us. They had the peculiar aspect of secret possession which a tropical forest has above all others, and which is so suggestive of the wild denizens which lurk in its gloomy recesses—the jaguars which lair in its thickets, the deadly snakes which glide through its wet, glistening leaves, the wonderful orchids which bloom there unheeded, the gaudy birds which enliven its green foliage with the colours of the rainbow, and the red-brown Indians who rove under its dripping branches, or lie in hammocks under the shelter of their palm-leaf ajoupahs, and croon, through the long rainy day, some legendary chant of their tribe. Nor is the element of association entirely wanting. The golden city of Manoa, the El Dorado of Elizabethan times, was situated in the heart of this region. The names of Humboldt and Raleigh brood over it. (747–48)
The passage contains all the sexual imagery of a male explorer facing the well-imagined unknown. Exotic plants, animals, and humans fill a landscape of primitive beauty and freedom, unburdened by history, yet pregnant with the desires of past explorers. Whatever one might say about this description, it is far from neutral; the adjectives are evaluative, alive with feeling. Nature beckons with promise and distant dangers; the land is rich with dreams.
Yet the report follows these descriptions with an admission: “Our real experience was destined to be of a different kind.” Instead of alluring wilds, they encounter the penal colony. Anchoring near the Iles
From the moment he sets foot in Guiana the individuality of each man is lost; he becomes a machine subject to the strictest discipline, suspicion and the severest of penalties. If he is unruly he is chained like a dog. If he is violent he is shot. He is known by his number, which is painted over his sleeping hammock and stamped on his clothes. A coarse sack hung on a nail over his bed contains all his worldly goods. (749)
Life is governed by routine; reveille at 5 A.M., breakfast, work between 6 and 10 A.M., 10:30 lunch, a siesta until 2 P.M. (partly spent fabricating “little curiosities” for sale), labor again from 2 to 6 P.M., and free time until 8. This routine blends into “monotonous years,” often ending with a corpse fed to the encircling sharks. While noting all this with detached distaste, the author gives little sense of outrage, admiring the cleanliness of the hospital and the dedication of the Sisters of Charity who work there. Later, however, the group visits the cells of the “maniacs” on St. Joseph, and here the observations acquire a more critical undertone. Solitary confinement is the rule, chained to the wall in cells lacking light and ventilation. Kicking an Arab who shows “no sign of life,” the attendant tells the party that the sooner this prisoner dies the better. A little later they meet a “victim of religious mania,” who, in a “soft and resigned voice,” claims to be greater than Jesus:
“I am,” he said, “a superior being sent to teach mankind; but I have been persecuted by the Jesuits. They have disemboweled me, they have turned my blood to water, and they have crucified me. But they cannot kill me. My inspiration keeps me alive. The sun has burned into my breast, and tried to scorch up my heart; but I will not give way to nature.” (751)
Finally, after inspecting the cemetery, they have an encounter with a different sort of prisoner: “a young man of about thirty years of age, with finely chiseled features, and a look of refinement and distinction which marked him off strikingly from the other convicts we saw.” His story arouses much sympathy, for he has remained there three years
This account is made all the more interesting in that it dates from a moment when the future of the French Guiana establishment was uncertain, after the redirection of new European prisoners to New Caledonia and before their reintroduction to Guyane and the new regulations of 1885. It attracted contemporary notice; a copy rests in a French archival dossier, surrounded by related papers and correspondence involving the French Ministry of the Navy and the Colonies. The article was brought to the attention of the ministry by a letter from William Tallach of the Howard Society, London.[14] A subsequent report from the governor of the colony to the minister, dated March 1, 1879, asserts that he has personally inspected the condition of the insane convicts and found sufficient light and air in the cells and rations that conform to the norms of transportation. He has prescribed several “slight improvements” in the sleeping arrangements but believes that the author of the article, while sincere, is comparing the treatment of the insane to that found in large institutions in France or England, rather than considering the particular circumstances and constraints of a penal colony. The report includes plans of the prison and asylum on the Ile St. Joseph, as well as the old barracks on the Ile Royale, where mentally ill convicts are to be transferred. A copy of this report apparently made its way to the interested parties in London, for in late April of that year, the secretary of the Howard Society composed a note thanking the ministry for its response, promising that they would “lay the vindication of the French authorities at the feet of the English public.” The case of the bagne was—temporarily—closed.
The Good Words article raises three points for consideration. First, it provokes response on the part of its readership, a response that attracts the attention of the French administration. This marks early fascination with and concern about the penal colony on the part of non-French observers and notes its increasingly controversial place in French foreign relations. Second, the article contains essential elements of exotic description that will later be worked into patterns of sensational representation. The world of the penal colony is a mixture of strict regulation, a debilitating climate, exotic surroundings, and draining despair. Its administration balances between discipline and punishment,
THE SHADOW OF A NAME
Consider that name, “Devil's Island.” Few later writers, especially those writing in English, would ignore it or its metaphorical possibilities. Again and again the words stretch imposingly across a title page to invoke damnation—a natural and recurring reference amid the litany of prisons. The allusion is too powerful for subtlety, as effortlessly, in the space of two words and a minimum of cultural associations, a prospective reader is transported to a dim red zone of suffering and retribution, heat and failed rebellion.
Looking up from books and across the waves, the actual referent is disarmingly modest: a small and narrow mound of rock and lush vegetation off the Guiana coast, the least of three Caribbean fragments lost in the equatorial Atlantic. Together with its two neighbors, this island presents a perfectly innocent profile, familiar in the late twentieth century from countless travel brochures of tropical islands. Indeed, its very insignificance becomes disturbing, a geographic footnote to the banality of evil. How, one wonders, could such a place come to represent damnation?
Historical investigation only complicates matters, for the name predates the prisoners. The triad of minor islands midway down the coast of French Guiana have no doubt borne many names, but since the late eighteenth century they have been marked in French as the Ile Royale (Royal Island), the Ile St. Joseph (St. Joseph's Island), and the Ile du Diable (Devil's Island). As an additional twist the group as a whole is now known as the Iles du Salut (Islands of Salvation). The most common and convincing explanation runs like this: once all three islands were known collectively as the Iles du Diable, but during the disastrous French attempt to colonize Kourou in 1763, settlers sought refuge from
The same Kourou expedition, coupled with later public accounts of exiles in revolutionary France, gave the colony a reputation as a tropical European grave. Thus when the first administrators of Louis-Napoleon's new overseas penal experiment disembarked their pioneering convicts on the islands, their choice of site was guided more by caution and convenience than a desire to punish—that would come more fully and fatefully amid fevers on the mainland. This set of historical and geographic facts presents us with a curious metaphorical assemblage: Hell is not simply where it's said to be, and its name is not quite the same thing as its naming, particularly at a distance. Devil's Island never constituted the administrative heart of the penal colony. Nor was it even the symbolic center of French references to colonial punishment—that dubious honor belonged to Cayenne, capital of the colony, and to the term bagne, used to describe the overseas prison.[16] Yet Devil's Island became a focus of attention for the world beyond the French Empire, particularly in England and America. To understand this phenomenon we must return to the scandal that briefly carried French Guiana onto the map of European history.
DREYFUS IN EXILE
“In any case, if this man Dreyfus is innocent,” the Duchess broke in, “he hasn't done much to prove it. What idiotic, raving letters he writes from the island.”
Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, 1913–1927
So profound is my solitude that I often seem to be lying in my tomb.
Alfred Dreyfus, Five Years of My Life, 1895
On October 15, 1894, a relatively obscure French artillery captain by the name of Alfred Dreyfus was arrested under the charge of high treason. What began as a military and diplomatic issue mushroomed over the ensuing decade into the most wrenching social and political drama of fin-de-siècle France: currents of nationalism, republicanism, and anti-Semitism, as well as tensions between church and state, army and civil society, all came to focus on this man and the question of his guilt
Of all historically prominent figures, Alfred Dreyfus is certainly one of the most unlikely. Born in 1859 in Mulhouse, he was the youngest child of a large, close-knit, and prosperous Alsatian Jewish manufacturing family. Following the annexation of the Alsace by Prussia after 1870, Alfred's parents moved to Basel. He eventually continued his education in France, and after an erratic beginning succeeded in gaining admission to the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique for training as a military officer. Graduating in the middle of his class, he developed a reputation as a steady, cautious, and industrious junior officer, one of the more promising Jewish members of the French army, efficient and publicly impersonal, a prototypical technocrat more than a stereotypical Jew. In 1890 he married the daughter of a diamond merchant and seemed poised for a carefully successful career before suspicion fell on him in 1894. Someone had been leaking French military secrets to imperial Germany, and circumstantial clues pointed toward younger, privileged members of the officer corps. The evidence against Dreyfus was sketchy, however, and when he protested his innocence and refused to kill himself, the army wavered in his prosecution, until an anti-Semitic campaign made the matter a subject of public controversy. Convicted, degraded, and deported, he seemed without hope of redemption until the separate efforts of his brother Mathieu and a certain Colonel Picquart of counterintelligence raised support for a retrial, support that included the politician Clemenceau and the writer Zola in prominent roles. The plot thickened as new documents were forged to strengthen the case against Dreyfus, even as a more likely culprit named Esterhazy was found innocent. Dreyfus's second military trial in 1899 confirmed his conviction but also pardoned him; it was only seven years later that
As noted earlier, the details of Dreyfus's ordeal of exile have met with little examination. Still, the protagonist of the Dreyfus Affair spent more than four years on Devil's Island, suffering from heat, excessive surveillance measures, and his own fevered sense of martyrdom. During that time he read what materials were permitted and wrote as furiously as he was allowed, producing a constant stream of letters to his wife, all of which were carefully censored and many never delivered. His movements were restricted as well as his communication, and privileges concerning supplements in diet and other small pleasures were infrequently allowed. The terms of his imprisonment grew particularly severe amid increasing paranoia about the possibility of his escape in late 1896, when a new palisade was constructed to block his view of the sea and irons were placed on his limbs at night. All of this hysteria over the special prisoner affected his guards and the rest of the colony, which was alert to the arrival of Prussian ships and exposed to the heightened publicity surrounding the chosen site of his exile.[19]
The placement of Dreyfus's punishment was quite deliberate. At the time of his conviction the bagne in New Caledonia was still open and serving as the officially designated receptacle for political prisoners under the anti-Communard law of 1872. But by 1895 New Caledonia appeared too luxurious for a traitor; European common prisoners were again being sent to Guiana, after all, and thus a special law was enacted to redirect Dreyfus there as well. His confinement on the smallest of the Iles du Salut would represent both literal and symbolic isolation. Prior to the arrival of Dreyfus, the Ile du Diable had recently held the lepers of the penal colony, and during his imprisonment, he would be its only prisoner.[20]
Let us return to 1895 and review some essential facts as the prisoner steps ashore. Dreyfus is an Alsatian, a Frenchman, a Jew, a man between many borders. His occupation is that of a French soldier, an officer from a wealthy industrialist family, an assimilated technocrat. He is convicted of betraying secrets of his nation, republican France, to the enemy, imperial Germany. Dreyfus is not executed but rather exiled,
In the Dreyfus Affair we see numerous struggles waged over terms of identity. Not the least interesting among these is Dreyfus's own internal struggle in response to his fate. Certain of his own innocence, he nevertheless believes in the crime; between the two convictions his suffering is immense, as he agonizes that a real enemy of France has escaped notice. His account of exile is one of heat, fevers, doubt, and agony. He finds himself removed, not only geographically, but also socially— stripped of family, rank, and honor. His horizon is limited outside his hut by the sea and by the vast silence of exile; he receives little news under the palm trees. Letters are withheld from him, censored, and, when delivered, subject to a delay of three months. Amid the constant reminders of his status as political convict, Dreyfus fights to maintain his inner convictions, repeating them over and over to himself. In his journal and letters to his wife, as well as petitions to the authorities, he stresses his patriotism, his belief in family, duty, honor, and France. Certainty in the correctness of obligation constitutes his essential creed: “As an innocent man, my imperative duty is to go on to the end of my strength. So long as they do not kill me, I shall ever and simply perform my duty.”[21]
However, he finds the challenge before him formidable. “Think of my perpetual tête-à-tête with myself,” he writes. “I am more silent than a Trappist Monk, in my profound isolation, a prey to sad thoughts, upon a lonely rock, sustaining myself only by the force of duty …. My days, my hours, slip by monotonously, in this agonizing, enervating waiting for the discovery of the truth.” But the days and nights grow infinite, and torture is “to have two eyes full of enmity leveled at you day and night, every instant and under every condition, and never to be able to escape or defy them!”[22] As time passes he grows more and more desperate.[23]
His experience on the “cursed” island is not only isolation but also a trial by nature: the climate, disease, and insects complete his misery. “Awful heat …. The hours are leaden …. Violent wind …. Impossible
Dreyfus the déporté provides an important image with which to survey Devil's Island. The immediate agony that the captain suffers is the terror of isolation. Like Napoleon he is cast away on an island, yet here the crime is not simply political transgression but a deeper treason. Dreyfus is dangerous precisely because he simultaneously represents everything the conservative forces arrayed against him love and hate: honor and patriotism on the one hand, secular reason and racial impurity on the other. Even as the Dreyfus Affair rages over the soul of France, Dreyfus fights for the soul of France within himself. On Bastille Day in 1895 he writes, “I have seen the tricolor flag aloft everywhere, the flag I have loyally served. My pen falls from my fingers. Some feelings cannot be expressed in words.” And then on January 4, 1897: “My heart, you know, it has not changed. It is the heart of a soldier, indifferent to all physical suffering, who holds honor before all else; who has lived, who has resisted this fearful, this incredible, uprooting of everything that makes the Frenchman, the man, of all that makes it possible to live; who has borne it all because he is a father and because he must see to it that honor is restored to the name his children bear.” For this particular prisoner, meaning, gender, and humanity—the very center of purpose—are to be found, painfully, hopefully, in the republican national flag.[25]
A quick reference to the broader outlines of historical context further positions our image of Dreyfus within the moral space of a national crisis. For all that he is Jewish, our deported captain nonetheless
A civilizing mission at home and a civilizing mission abroad meet in a specter of degeneration, the potential downward path from modern to primitive. Along the intersection between a modernizing Metropole and a colonizing empire we find the penal colony, and amid images of race, gender, and nature we find its representations, colonial shadows of the modern age. In this sense the laws of 1885, particularly those concerning recidivists, and the politically charged deportation of Dreyfus mark a redefinition of the penal colony. With these events the moral narrative of the project shifts, from that of advancing the colony while disciplining individuals through labor to that of cleansing the social
SENSATIONALIST FICTION
Yet exile—the lonely suffering of a noble Frenchman far from home— is not the only threat of Devil's Island. Beyond the terror of isolation lies another terror, that of association. Not only does Dreyfus find himself cut off from his bourgeois milieu and his position as husband and father, but he also finds himself transported, away from Paris into a realm of heat and rain; as his sanity ebbs he is sharing his hut with insects. Meanwhile, common criminals labor ashore under a glaring sun. They too are not only isolated from cities and families but also associated, with each other and their new surroundings.[29] This association called upon sensational imagery, references, and metaphors as florid as the local environment and evoked a range of passions as exaggerated as those in the Dreyfus Affair. Many of these images had existed before. Visitors to French Guiana, both French and non-French, had made much of the penal colony as a site of interest and curiosity.[30] But as the century turned and decades progressed, the pattern gelled, and references reverberated into a sustained outcry. On the French side this resulted primarily from the work of a young investigative journalist named (appropriately enough) Albert Londres. On the foreign side this stemmed from a range of memoirs, reports, journalism, fiction, and films, largely in English and much of it presented for an American audience.[31]
The titles of works written or marketed in English give a sense of the language in play: Horrors of Cayenne, Dry Guillotine, Hell on Trial, Devil's Island, Hell's Outpost, The Jungle and the Damned, Hell beyond the Seas, Flag on Devil's Island, Condemned to Devil's Island, The Man from Devil's Island, Isle of the Damned, Loose among Devils, Damned and Damned Again.[32] For most of these books, the cover represents the contents quite accurately. The subtitles, when present, make reference to experience or “revelations.” What these works promise is real terror, a narration that claims to be both terrible and true. The French line of this particular subgenre operates in much the same way and even employs many of the same metaphors of hell (l'enfer).[33] Yet it is the English appeal to “Devil's Island” that most clearly marks the crucial symbolic space, with geographic overtones but without geographical exactitude. Those discussed are “damned” and obviously
METAPHORS OF COLONIAL REVERSAL
You see it there on the Horizon, bleak and barren. A windswept rock that rises out of the Atlantic. A spectre. Desolate. That's one part of this Hell. You see it again upon the broad Maroni river. A jungle pushed back by wretches who were men. Here are Men in Hell, who came from across the sea to die in loathsome squalor, because they broke the laws of their fellow men. Devil's Island … Cauldron of a thousand sinister fears; graveyard of many an unfortunate creature. What sorrows have been suffered here, what agonies endured, what deaths died!
W.E. Allison-Booth, Devil's Island, 1931
We are on the opening page of a 1931 book, Devil's Island: Revelations of the French Penal Settlements in Guiana, authored by one W.E. Allison-Booth, sometime sailor, sensationalist writer, and amateur ethnographer. Fascinated by the penal colony of French Guiana, he subsequently arranges to miss his ship in order to spend time there and get a closer look. Shocked by the brutal conditions that he finds, he proceeds to write a horrified account, decrying the suffering of these white “patriots.” Despite the deepening depression, his publisher claims that American readers pledge three hundred thousand dollars to help free one ancient, noble convict.[34]
But what was the world that Allison-Booth abandoned ship to see, the penal colony in action, circa 1931? Devil's Island offers a rather hasty account of prisoners, “soldiers,” Chinese merchants, and fallen women, floating somewhere between sharks and snakes under a hot sun. The narrative consists of anecdotes of prison life interspersed with shocked observations and reflections built around one elderly Frenchman, sensitive, refined, and innocent, yet doomed to spend his years in exile. While clear about his moral ground, Allison-Booth is vague
Allison-Booth was far from the first to attempt an exposé of the penal colony, and quite certainly not the best. Albert Londres's searing account of 1923 set a standard for much of what would follow and moreover played a role in the eventual suppression of the institution. And it was the 1928 work of fellow American Blair Niles, Condemned to Devil's Island, that first aroused Allison-Booth's curiosity.[35] Indeed, Allison-Booth's contribution can claim little status as a literary, political, or historical masterpiece. By even the loosest of ethnographic standards its claim to authority is dubious, for despite the publisher's assurances and the first-person narrative, the text does little to affirm that the author ever actually set foot in French Guiana. Yet however that might be, in his very excess Allison-Booth clearly surveys that other entity, the symbolic space of Devil's Island. Partway through his work comes the following reflection:
I fell to thinking of this paradox of modern civilization. One branch of the government goes to great expense to capture some wild animal for the national zoological collection. During its journey from the jungle to France the captive specimen receives the most careful of treatment, and everything possible is arranged for its comfort, and every care taken that it be brought back alive. At the same time another branch of this identical Government cages up men, human beings, takes them away from civilization with apparently no thought of their comfort, and takes them to a jungle to rot. It is as though they seek to re-populate the jungle with an inferior type of beast.[36]
Here Allison-Booth stumbles on a central horror of the French penal colony: the same jungle from which collectors extract beautiful butterflies and other exotic animals and plants receives its own specimens from civilization in return. Nature—no tamed garden here, but a wild and savage realm—takes its revenge. In the shadow of progress lies the threat of degeneration.
Indeed, the later penal colony presented the possibility of inversion, of a place where hierarchies could be turned and reordered, where a black man could be a guard and a white man his servant, where homosexuality could represent a norm. Through its slow unraveling along the margins of civilization and nature, the French bagne reveals an intersection between national and imperial imaginations, a colonial hell for secular sinners. To explicate what such a claim might mean, and what sensational
THE MALE UNDERWORLD
I can no longer endure myself. The bagne has entered in me. I no longer am a man, I am a bagne …. A convict cannot have been a small child.
Convict to Albert Londres,[37] L'Homme qui s'evada/Au bagne, 1923
If the essential condition of the penal colony was separation and reassociation, then the implied punishment of the bagne was that of a fall, the loss of one status and the realization of another. The first element of this process was quite literal; the modern prison ritual of registration, which identified the individual in the most minute terms, before removing all traces of individuality and replacing the name with a number.[38] Blair Niles's Condemned to Devil's Island describes the experience as one of scientific, dehumanizing classification:
[T]he dreadful day when he had stood stripped in the office where the authorities registered finger prints and made inventories of men's bodies, recording every distinguishing mark, every wart or mole, every birth blotch and every tattooed design, making measurements, and adding these things to one's name and age and birthplace, and to the individual crime histories and sentences sent over by the French courts—all indexed and cross-indexed to facilitate emergency reference …. [P]art of a man seemed amputated and preserved in card catalogues; much as entomologists impale upon pins all that is mortal of once living insects, classifying as hymenoptera, lepidoptera, and so on and so forth, the brittle remains of creatures who had known life.[39]
Once across the divide between free and imprisoned, one could no longer depend on an identity or system of connections left behind. In dress and daily action, one became another being, stripped of most evidence of the past and always, categorically—even when in solitary confinement—a member of a group. In this way class position was redefined, for while one might have distant influence and money hidden in one's body, local influence was what mattered most.[40] The penal colony was, by all accounts, a violent place. To protect life and goods, the loyalty of other convicts and knowledge of guards who could be bribed usually outweighed one's former occupation or station of birth.
Thus the loss of individuality was a social condition, experienced in common. Whether or not one came from the masses, here one became part of a new mass. The theme of noble prisoner, which we encountered earlier in the 1879 British account, crops up repeatedly in both writings by outsiders and first-person memoirs.[41] Amid the downtrodden general body of convicts, exceptions are provided who demand our sympathy—the man with a noble brow, the literate intellectual, the youth suffering for a crime of passion, or the innocent martyr. How, we are encouraged to ask, could such a figure end up in such a setting? The incongruity reflects anxiety over the possibility of failure, either of the penal system or of the larger order in which it is embedded. It also identifies the essential state of being in the penal colony: when in the bagne, one becomes a bagnard.
Loss of individuality entailed loss of masculinity and the certain comfort of one's sexual identity. Most works on the convicts, sensational to academic, note (and generally abhor) the prevalence of homosexuality in the bagne.[42] Indeed, one of its historians suggests that not to do so is to engage in misrepresentation: “It is not possible to write of the convict stations of Guiana and not mention the perversion of morals and the effect of the whole question on convict behavior. Not to mention homosexuality and the dramas it caused would be like describing a motor car without mentioning the motor, or writing a treatise on ballistics without mentioning combustion.”[43] The slang of the penal colony records a prototypical relationship of involuntary domination, a fort-à-bras (strong arm) acquiring a môme (brat) as a passive partner. Much of the competition and violence between prisoners is ascribed to the contested establishment and maintenance of such relationships. Interspersed in these portrayals one finds scattered stories of devotion, lovers who sacrifice all for each other and close companions (sexual or no) who together face the world. The personal accounts contain frequent vignettes of rape and abuse, presented as both dehumanizing and emasculating.[44]
Neither the loss of social status and incorporation into a new, stigmatized group nor the assertion of violent sexual norms between men are phenomena unique to the French penal colony; they are generic to accounts of most prisons. Rather, what made the bagne particularly “hellish” to its observers were additional features attendant to its peculiar colonial status. Imprisonment here took place in a setting where other significant norms could be (and were) upset, principally the racial categories that prevailed throughout the rest of the French Empire.
RACIAL DEGENERATION
And on top of the strain and the pain Comes the worst, the ultimate insult The Arab guard barks at us, “Get moving white man!” Day after day after day we suffer this O sons of proud Gaul, is this what you have fallen to! When even the strongest of you must hang down your heads for sheer shame. Weep—weep for yourselves, you cowardly convicts: You're not men anymore!
Convict song “Oraput”[45]
In the bagne privilege of race did not hold. Many of the prison trustees were from North Africa, some of the guards (and at least one director) were black, and a contingent of troops protecting the colony were from Senegal.[46] Although convicts came from throughout the empire during the later period, the majority were white and from Metropolitan France. This created scenarios dramatically altered from the norms of imperial relationships: the possibility of the “colonizer” being controlled by the “colonized.” The implications of these scenarios were not lost on the authors in question. René Belbenoit, a former French convict turned American crusader, makes much of the penal colony's role as a substitute for slavery, describing the history of Guyanais labor as a racial sequence: “the black experiment, the yellow experiment, the white experiment.” By coming last in the sequence, “the white experiment” contradicts assumptions of racial superiority in European representations of slavery and imperialism. One photograph in Devil's Island presents “a half-blind and half-starved white convict” who sweeps the road, the caption emphasizing that he is under a “nigger overseer,” while another shows a Senegalese soldier outside his
In addition, few writers, French or foreign, fail to note national differences or the particular irony that this notorious, primitive penal colony was run by refined, “civilized” France. The German Batzler-Heim and the Dane Krarup-Nielsen bitterly complain about their treatment (mistakenly in the second case) as “Bosche,” while the Frenchmen Londres and Belbenoit base their crusade partly on concern for France's good name.[49] The American Blair Niles chooses to study the bagne precisely because of the peculiarities of its human geography:
I selected the notorious Devil's Island Penal Colony as the place where I would make my investigation, because there the drama of the criminal is staged against a backdrop of tropical jungle, where descendants of escaped Negro slaves live the jungle life of Africa, dancing the African dances and worshipping the African gods. While, locked behind the bars of prison, are criminals sent from highly civilized France. The Devil's Island Colony thus offers a startling contrast between the primitive and the civilized …. And since the French possess to an extraordinary degree the gift of self-expression, it is my hope that through the French mind, we may come to understand better the condemned of all other nationalities.[50]
Throughout the texts we slide between categories of nation and race, as well as differing conceptions of civilization.
Racial inversion struck an especially strong chord among foreign observers, particularly those from North America, focused less on the divide between European and Arab and more on the divide between black and white, between the descendants of those who had most obviously been slaves and those who had not. In the penal colony, “[a]fter centuries the black man had at last his chance to revile the white.”[51] A Canadian reporter en route to Africa saw the same stark racial threat as Allison-Booth:
Over the whole of French Guiana the black vulture of death broods and breeds …. The country is patrolled by black soldiers from Senegal. Black
After encountering “a negro with a white suit and a black revolver” at the customshouse, he witnesses two white men “cleaning a negro's outhouse.” “What,” he wonders, almost reflectively, “would the framers of America's Jim Crow laws think of this?”[53]
A particular source of outrage for these observers is the lot of the libérés, those prisoners who had served out their sentence but were fated to live out their lives in French Guiana under the provision of doublage, the regulation requiring a convict to remain in the penal colony after his term of confinement. Penniless, denied even the minimum care of the penal administration, they haunted the civil colony, searching for odd jobs and scrambling for cigarette butts. The “Avenue of Liberty” in Cayenne, our Canadian noted, was the “most misnamed street on earth.” And as Krarup-Nielsen put it: “It is necessary to live among the ‘liberated’ prisoners of Guiana to realize their hopeless condition and understand the full irony of the word ‘libéré.’ As the convicts like to say, ‘Le bagne commence à la libération [the penal colony begins at the moment of liberation].’” The libérés, he thought, were the true pariahs, men “despised even by the poorest Negros whose forefathers in their day were brought to Guiana in chains, as slaves.”[54] In addition to performing most of the menial labor in both the penal and civil colonies (such as emptying chamber pots) and acting as houseboys (garçons de maison), filling the roles of female as well as male servants, the libérés were reduced to fabricating trinkets for the souvenir trade—miniature, cigar-clipping guillotines proving particularly popular items. Thus even when they were freed, the bagne continued to set the terms of their identity. And French Guiana would claim them as well. In the forest that surrounded them and stymied their escape, convicts and libérés alike found one of their most reliable sources of income:
In the ruined Colony of Guiana, men with pale faces and bodies wracked with malaria hunt butterflies grimly for a living. There, in that rain-soaked jungle which the condemned curse, God has put a brilliant thing, resplendent and fragile, to help miserable men conquer their freedom …. And these gorgeous butterflies, the only thing of real beauty in that infernal colony, wretched men must destroy for some food and money to hoard for escape from death.[55]
When pinned in turn and shipped to collectors, the tropics fed those it punished.
FEARS OF THE FOREST
The penal administration was never betrayed by nature—the bush, the swamps, the sea, the climate, the sharks, the mosquitoes, the snakes, all were faithful, honest servants.
Memoir of a French forger, FrancisLagrange and William Murray, Flag on Devil's Island, 1961
Throughout these accounts runs an acute awareness of wild nature and its role in the enterprise of the bagne. Allison-Booth was far from alone in employing metaphors of wild animals when describing the convicts. George John Seaton, a wayward Englishman who spent twenty years as a relégué, writes in a similar tone: “Even I—the effete socialite—acquired a sinewy brutality. I was no longer the man-about-town; I was not even a man; I slid back a dozen centuries and obeyed the law that said, ‘if all else dies, I shall survive.’” For Seaton the whole penal universe becomes one of savage order, governing prisoners and guard alike: “[The guards] were, in a sense, just as imprisoned as we were …. They still had to endure the blistering heat and savage rains. They were just as likely to contract leprosy or tuberculosis. They were like animal trainers in the circus; they dared never relax.”[56] Others also recognized the egalitarian side effects of shared local conditions, as well as the fear of living next to violence. The prisoners, abused as they were, represented a constant source of threat: “There was a saying in the bagne to the effect that we were all—convicts, guards and functionaries—prisoners: ‘In the bagne one half watches the other half.’”[57]
As geography itself becomes a technique of isolation, the French penal experiment in Guiana threatens further ordeals implicit in separation from all that is civilized. Here, in an inversion of Rousseau, nature becomes part of the punishment, as the reputed primitive elements of society are returned to the reputed terrors of the jungle. Tropical wilderness itself serves as a menacing enclosure, between steamy climate, exotic and dangerous animals in the swamps and forests, sharks in the sea, and rumors of cannibal Indians. In sensational accounts these tropics incessantly punish as they guard, turning everyday existence into constant torment: “Fever and dysentery get every man!
But to run from the human prison is only to face the real prison, to go deeper into the equatorial nightmare of untracked jungle. The narrative of escape becomes that of a caged beast, driven mad by the sun, fleeing from the wilderness and fighting to survive, far more than that of a clever deviant outwitting a rational machine. Exotic nature itself is the real enemy, full of hidden traps and unknown dangers:
They still felt imprisoned, but prisoners now of this strange dumb forest, where in no direction could they look more than a few feet ahead, this forest where thorns tore the flesh and clothing of men who would journey through it. In its uncanny half-light anything—beast or man-hunter— might be standing quite close, close enough to spring upon you, and in the mocking mosaic of sun and shadow you would never have the fraction of a warning.[59]
And even if a convict can elude his pursuers and avoid the savage plants, the snakes, the sharks, and the constant threat of disease, another and terrible possibility awaits: at any point he may lose his way. Land that is uncivilized is also unmapped; both forest and ocean are vast and unmarked. As the commandant of the bagne would inform convicts on their arrival, “The real guards here are the jungle and the sea.”[60]
Many of the prisoners, after all, were from urban environments, and even those from outside of the city had little experience with the tropics or this specific locale. Ignorance attendant to the knowledge of civilization became exposed. The question became starkly technical in nature: “Could a Frenchman—lost—cut off from human kind—live in the jungle alone?”[61] To be successful in the forest one must be familiar with its ways, to be able to exist naturally within it. In the words of one European who made his fortune in French Guiana during the era: “I lived the life of my friend the tiger. The jungle that kills did not have me, it spared me because I loved it fervently, because I owed it everything, because it taught me to be free.”[62] But a “Parisian, naked, climbing a jungle tree … really it seemed as if a man oughtn't to be born as defenseless as he is.”[63] Lost amid strange surroundings, lacking most rudimentary skills of survival and means of support, such a prisoner was trapped more surely by his freedom than by his imprisonment. Listening to an animal howling at night, Blair Niles's protagonists realize their own limits beyond the world of men: “There was
For all that the bagnard might have lived at the edge of civilization, he was never a creature of wilderness, never a man beyond society. Rather, transported, stripped of identity, subject to transposed norms and reversed hierarchies, he represented a limit of degeneration. This limit was made visible in the bagne but never crossed. The sensation evoked in accounts of Devil's Island depended on empathy, an understanding that this underworld remained connected to the world that created it:
If you weren't afraid to come down among us, where we have to live, you'd see. As step by step you went lower into our pit you'd understand all along the way the causes. In the blackest depths you'd find you could see. It would be as if someone held a lantern to show every rung of the ladder that leads to us. But to you standing safe on the top, looking down, we are strange and horrible—we frighten you. Why? Is it because you see yourselves in us? … Yet our roots are up in your civilization. Don't forget that![65]
PLACING THE PENAL COLONY
You see, the world is made up of three things: heaven, earth, and the bagne.
Director of the penal colony to Albert Londres, Au bagne, 1923
As Michel Pierre notes, French Guiana represented such a distant and mythic universe for many French people that when a young attorney compared shipyard workers to the “convicts of Cayenne, under the terrible climate of the Pacific,” no one expressed shock at his glaring error in geography.[66] The colonial bagne existed in some vague unlocated tropics, and one ocean was as good as another. What mattered was the surreal sense of horror associated with the name—heat and disease, not latitude and longitude.
At a higher level of abstraction, the very definition of a penal colony complicates the spatial vocabulary of empire. Whether directly settled or remotely administered, a colony represents an extremity or appendage: its essential geographic point of reference is only partially itself. The goal of a colony is the transformation of a natural or unfamiliar space into a recognizable or productive one. A nation, in contrast,
The historical sequence of the French penal colony indicates changing conceptions of race, gender, colony, and nation. During an era of high imperialism, offenders are removed from the shores of France to beyond those shores, from the national margin to the imperial rim. Convict labor first offers a potential substitute for slave labor, but then the particular colonial climate, read in racial terms, is deemed inappropriate for European convicts. Two decades later that which is harmful to Europeans becomes the appropriate universal punishment for all and, furthermore, the site of permanent exile for recidivists—those whose delinquent nature renders them unfit for France. At the same time, an effort to biologically and socially extend the nation by means of transporting women convicts and encouraging rehabilitation and reproduction through the formation of European families founders badly, failing to transform Guyane into a French Australia. Rather, the bagne lingers on as a male world of dubious sexual repute, a land of laboring criminals, delinquents, and political prisoners, those encouraged neither to return nor to reproduce. It receives those outside family and propriety, those destined for colonial existence—the fallen of a nation.
It is tempting to take Devil's Island as a literal metaphor and see the penal colony as a nationalist site of suffering, somewhere between civil purgatory and a form of colonial hell. The allusion of purgatory is a useful one, representing a “third place” within the symbolic geography
In allowing a degree of significance to metaphors drawn from religion and filtered through commercial media, I would nonetheless keep in mind the technical apparatus to which they were applied. Throughout its existence the bagne remained an organization devoted to a principle of activity: the convicts worked, and when they did not work they received either medical treatment or punishment. The product of this labor was dubious at best; the penal colony produced little of material value and required massive subventions from the French government to continue its operations.[70] Original intent and promises notwithstanding, it did little to further the economic development of the region. Land was cleared, trees were cut, but no lasting agricultural presence emerged. What work was done, was done poorly, slowly, and incompletely. Albert Londres gives the most cutting statistic in his description of the road under construction by the penal administration, route coloniale Numéro 1, which the convicts call “Route Zero”: “They've been working on it for over fifty years …. It's twenty-four kilometers long!”[71] Noting the severe conditions under which the construction takes place, he wonders if the purpose of the labor was to build a road or to kill convicts. In effect it accomplished both, one slowly and uselessly, and the other slowly and painfully. Thus while the penal colony functioned as a machine of sorts, it was a less than perfect one, poorly designed, badly maintained, and perpetually inefficient. Yet it remained in place, rusty and leaking, failing repeatedly but never dismantled. In it we have an important image for the tropics: the ruined machine at the margins of mechanization.
And around the ruined machine we have a ruined land. Even as the one decayed, the other spoiled, infected by its reputation. For those living in Guiana, the bagne had both a specific and immediate presence
Yet the symbolic weight of its reputation should not be underestimated. Even now, few discussions of French Guiana fail to mention its role as a penal colony, and during the period of its operation the reference was omnipresent. For those who grew up in the terre de bagne, it cast a shadow they could rarely escape: the need to always explain. The poet and politician Léon-Gontran Damas, as notable a literary figure as French Guiana has yet produced, was sent by his parents to Metropolitan France in 1926 for further schooling. He later recalled the moment the principal of the school asked him where he was from. When Damas replied “Guyane,” the official could not help inquiring further: “‘But this is the country of the convicts?’ to which Damas answered: ‘It is only the depository, the factory being elsewhere, in the Metropole.’ With some blushing and hesitation the Principal pursued: ‘But would your father be a convict?’ Upon which Damas replied: ‘If my father were a convict I would be as white as you, Sir.’”[73]
In 1938 Damas, working for what would become the Musée de l'Homme in Paris, published a report upon the effects of colonialism on Guiana entitled Retour de Guyane. Above all he attacked the “curse of the penal colony,” which humiliated all Guyanais abroad and corrupted society within the country itself, questioning “what right France had to corrupt a colony in this manner” and reduce it to the level of a “cesspool” for the protection of the mother country. Calling for a renewed focus on gold mining in French Guiana on the grounds of both economics and “honor,” Damas warned that the expiration of the colony might herald the “collapse of the French Empire.”[74]
THE NATURAL UNDERWORLD
We arrive at kilometer twenty-four. It's the end of the world. And for the first time, I see the bagne!
Albert Londres, Au bagne, 1923
Out we go, our tools over our shoulders Stumbling in and out among the gloomy trees Like a row of drunken devils For this is the real Hell, not Satan's.
Convict song “Oraput”
In the penal colony we find a state of nature, but a degenerate one.[75] Rather than forget historical origins in alluding to mythical ones, the bars of the bagne twist metaphors of the primitive into the very boundary of civilization, mixing temporal and geographic orders. The jungle is mythically terrible, and imprisonment within this mythic space becomes a modern reality. Civilization, Enlightenment, modernity—all these amorphous narrative bulwarks have their shadows, gaps, and fears. The terror of Devil's Island takes shape amid metaphoric invocations of the jungle and of the savage, of associations between the beast without and the beast within. Rather than provide an economic substitute for slavery, the penal colony becomes a zone representing the threat of decivilization, a place where the codes of civilized life are suspended and held in abeyance, where white manly morals erode, and where colonials command. If we follow Michael Taussig's vocabulary for cultural dimensions of terror beyond physical brutality, then Devil's Island should be understood as a space of death.[76] At its center stands Kafka's machine, madly writing a sentence of suffering. If no longer internally coherent, the marks remain open for interpretation by different audiences.
For those in Metropolitan France the penal colony served as a hidden punishment, a distant if graphic terror, retaining elements of torture out of public view. Yet it retained a veneer of reformation, for the convicts were still told to “make a new life for themselves.”[77] In addition, shipping convicts away from France in the name of colonization cloaked their punishment in the robes of the “civilizing” mission: they would be part of an effort to build a greater France, to develop Guiana, and to integrate it into a Franco-world system. At the same time the bagne underscored that resistance to the humane norms of France could lead to decivilization and exile in the wilderness.
For those in Metropolitan nations outside France, the effect was equally distanced, while further removed; the punishment was not only hidden but also the product of another's justice. That this justice could itself appear unjust would only reinforce symbolic national borders and be incorporated within varying claims to civilization. Torture here is another's responsibility, hell over a different horizon, where it invokes righteous outrage and fear. We find such outrage in the British Empire, itself competing with France to civilize the world, where penal transportation was outdated policy. We also find it in the Americas (especially the United States), lands partway between colony and nation and uncomfortably close, in both geographic and symbolic terms, to the bagne. Within this outrage lingers a faint recognition of the possibility of colonial reversal and the evaporation of racial privilege, a small, distorted echo of the nightmare of plantation slavery.
For those sent to French Guiana, however, the penal colony served directly as a public display, a constant reminder of the operations of justice. The convicts were not merely confined but forced to labor on public works. Official executions were performed by that once-humane instrument, the guillotine, but before an audience of convicts and by a fellow convict, far beyond the gates of Paris. A slower execution, that of the “dry guillotine,” the effects of the tropical climate, surrounded the entire process of deportation, reminding the convicts that this punishment could only happen here and not within Metropolitan boundaries. Theirs was a raw and primitive environment, one of torture and deprivation away from the public eye. Against the truth invoked in their conviction—justice—lay a suggested truth invoked in their punishment: no longer civilized, they were no longer human.
And for those already living in French Guiana, the penal colony also served as a public spectacle, if one not aimed directly at them or of their making. Not only did the proximity of prison life to their own lives parade the power of justice before them in an immediate fashion, but the constant importation of prisoners for this apparatus of punishment emphasized the particularly colonial nature of this power. Uncivilized elements were sent to them; their relation to France was that of a repository for human waste, and acts and punishments deemed unseemly for the homeland could still occur within their boundaries. In addition, the appropriation of the names “Guyane” and “Cayenne” in myths of the bagne and “Devil's Island” precluded other identities, while burdening the area with a symbolic brand and a historical chain to France. “The bagne,” writes Ian Hammel, “left only a disastrous brand on Guiana.”[78]
By the time Allison-Booth wrote his Devil's Island, the penal colony supported few claims for the marriage of rehabilitation and production. Despite improved medical technology, death rates in the bagne remained high; despite the ongoing labor of up to six thousand men, the organization depended heavily on state subsidies and accomplished almost nothing. A distant and rigorous punishment of little economic value, older forms of power existing along with modern ones, the exotic intermingled with the normal—many loose ends of colonial history lie buried in the bagne. Modernizing France, a convulsive patchwork of provinces, cities, farms, and factories, casts its shadow overseas. The logic of moralization embodied by the penal colony comes to function in reverse: rather than produce reform and development, the bagne institutionalizes failure at a distance. “It is as though they seek to repopulate the jungle with an inferior type of beast.” Amid melodrama, the sensational account offers telling insight.
When Allison-Booth takes a farewell walk by the River Maroni, arm in arm with his favorite convict, he leaves us with a parting vision of the margins of nations and empires and the boundaries of nature and civilization. On the wide banks of a South American river, framed by the tropical heavens, two edges of France converge: the colonial frontier and the guillotine. But the beauty of the sky is deceptive, for the land below them is itself an executioner: the Dry Guillotine, the colonial blade of justice. Natural as they may be, these tropics represent the earthly work of humans, and our passage concludes with this reminder:
Gazing across the river we could see the jungle of Dutch Guiana—a vast stretch of impenetrable undergrowth containing exaggerated beauty and horror, which alike were the creation of the same God. To our left, on the French side of the river, stood the guillotine shed, plainly visible against the background of a beautiful tropical sky. The stars twinkled brightly, like myriads of avenging angels gazing on this beauty of Nature, that had been transformed by man into hell on earth.[79]
