1. “In der Strafkolonie.” See Thiher (1990: 51). As Hayman (1982: 187) points out, Kafka was perhaps influenced by early reports of trench warfare and would surely have heard of Devil's Island from the Dreyfus Affair and German war propaganda.

2. The work was first published in French as Surveiller et Punir (Foucault 1975 and 1979). Foucault locates the central motif of mechanisms of discipline in Jeremy Bentham's plans for the Panopticon, a model penitentiary where inmates would live under the constant gaze of a central tower and each other. The

3. For a sampling of the reception of Foucault among French historians of the modern prison, see Perrot (1980), Petit (1984), and Petit et. al (1991). For more conventional narratives of French prison history in English, see O'Brien (1982) and Gordon Wright (1983). Ignatieff (1978) offers an account of English prison reform that strongly overlaps yet remains differently positioned than Foucault's. Garland (1990) surveys the place of punishment in social theory from a less threatening perspective. Semple (1993) provides an exhaustive study of Bentham's Panopticon project. Beyond debates over chronology and the role of class, some of the reaction to Foucault's metahistorical account, I would suggest, stems from theoretical discomfort with his ambivalent portrayal of the Enlightenment legacy of reform or simple misreading, such as that of those who assume he claims that torture has vanished from all of the contemporary world.

4. Foucault (1979: 272, 279). See also interviews in Foucault (1980a), especially pages 63–77, 146–65, and 224–25. T. Mitchell (1991: 35) and Kaplan (1995) contain discussions of Panopticon prototypes in colonial contexts, and Stoler (1995) gives a wider reinterpretation of Foucault's thesis on sexuality in light of imperial dynamics of race.

5. The most common etymology given for bagne (bagnio, in English) links it with a bathhouse, or more likely, simply a building in which prisoners were housed during the period of hostilities between Mediterranean Europe and the Ottoman Empire (Le Clère 1973: 16–17, 27; Petit et al. 1991: 169).

6. See Ignatieff (1978) and Gordon Wright (1983). Another line of descent would lie in Russia, where links between exile and the settlement of Siberia strengthened in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Petit 1984). Because the Russian experience represents an alternative version of empire one step removed from the intercontinental ventures of England and France, and because references to Siberia appear far less frequently than Botany Bay in the French documents that concern us, I leave this thread to one side.

7. For a more detailed description and chronology of the Australian adventure, see Shaw (1966), Hirst (1983), Carter (1988), and especially R. Hughes (1986), the most readable and comprehensive account, from which these figures are largely drawn (R. Hughes 1986: 161–62).

8. Ignatieff (1978: 47). Lest the complexity of genealogies be lost, it should be noted that Howard's views owed much to Dutch prisons, and other British reformers were aware of earlier experiments in France and elsewhere.

9. See Bentham (1962), Ignatieff (1978: 75), and Jackson (1987: 2).

10. Jackson (1988: 45).

11. Cited in Jackson (1987: 12). This is a draft passage apparently intended for his Finance Committee report. For further detail on Bentham's Panopticon scheme and his opposition to Australian transportation, see Everett (1966), Hume (1973, 1974), Jackson (1987, 1988), and Semple (1993), in addition to Bentham (1962, 1977).

12. Hirst (1983: 21–27) and R. Hughes (1986: 162).

13. From Vidal de Lingendes, “De la colonisation pénale,” 1845, p. 11. CAOM H bagne 1.

14. Forster (1996) provides a focused survey of French interest in Botany Bay and Australia during the period. When asked in 1851 to prepare a report on prior French projects of penal transport, the head of the French archives traced the tradition back to the era of the initial settlement of Canada and a 1540 patent letter given to Jean Françoise de la Rouge that allowed him to recruit sailors from among those facing the death sentence (CAOM H bagne 3). Experiments in Louisiana between 1718 and 1722, however, foundered (Gordon Wright 1983: 31). See also Pierre (1982: 10–12).

15. Gordon Wright (1983: 31, 44).

16. Cited in Devèze (1965: 28, see also 25–26).

17. See Gordon Wright (1983: 45–46), Devèze (1965: 51), and Pierre (1982: 15).

18. Gordon Wright (1983: 48–53).

19. “Memoire sur le choix d'un lieu de déportation,” signed Forestier, dated 1816, in CAOM H bagne 1. Colin Forster reviews this same text, noting that Forestier was Councilor of State of the Committee of the Navy and Colonies (1996: 15–18).

20. T. Ginouvier, Le Botany-Bay Français, ou colonisation des condamnées aux peines afflictives[sic] et infamants et des forçats libérés, printed in Paris, 1856. CAOM H bagne 3. See also Forster (1996: 28).

21. CAOM H bagne 1. Another dated 1830 makes an argument based on what will be a familiar racial logic of labor: “French Guiana indeed is not in the least way proper to this end[;] … experience of several centuries has proved that all labor in the air of these climates is mortal to whites.” CAOM H bagne 2.

22. CAOM Guyane L1 (01), Lettre du Gouverneur de la Guyane française à direction, 11 September 1828.

23. Gordon Wright (1983: 70–81).

24. Documents dated July 1848, in Bodereau des pièces communiqués à la Commision présidée par M. Amiral de Mackau, Mars 1851. CAOM H bagne 1. For Marquesas reference, see Devèze (1965: 90) and Gordon Wright (1983: 92).

25. Cited in Clair (1990: 41) and Pierre (1982: 17). Louis-Napoleon was himself fascinated with Australia (Miles 1988: 21).

26. Gordon Wright (1983: 93, 295–96).

27. Devèze (1965: 119–29); Merle (1995: 40); Pierre (1982: 18–19); and Gordon Wright (1983: 93–94).

28. From L'Univers (Union Catholique), 16 January 1857. CAOM H bagne 1.

29. Witness a tract on penal deportation written in 1828 by a navy officer and later reprinted in 1840. The author criticizes British transportation for allowing prisoners excessive freedom and failing to encourage rehabilitation, stating that the real purpose of transportation must be “moral” health: “The goal of deportation is not only to distance from society those men that it has branded but also to return them to honest sentiments and to rehabilitate them in their own regard, by distancing them from places where the memory of the

30. CAOM H bagne 1.

31. Vidal de Lingendes, “De la colonisation pénale,” 1845, p. 14. CAOM H bagne 1. The passage concludes by considering the opposite extreme: “On the other hand, to exile the inhabitants of southern countries amid frozen deserts like those of Siberia would expose them to most excruciating suffering, and perhaps also to death.”

32. The same governor sought to encourage convicts to marry prostitutes from Martinique, but his plans met with little success, and he was quickly removed from office (Devèze 1965: 129; also Clair 1990: 19).

33. Cited in Devèze (1965: 130), who notes that the clearing of Ile Royale took only fifteen days. See also Clair (1990: 20).

34. Journal de Debats Politiques et Littéraires, 30 July 1852. CAOM H bagne 1.

35. Les Antilles, no. 20, 10 March 1852. CAOM H bagne 1.

36. Devèze (1965: 133) and Miles (1988: 25–27).

37. CAOM H bagne 4.

38. Letter of 21 December 1854. CAOM H bagne 14.

39. Devèze (1965: 135).

40. “Extrait du rapport de M. le Médecin en chef de Cayenne,” 1854. CAOM H bagne 14.

41. Letter of 15 February 1857. CAOM H bagne 14. On diet, see Notice sur la transportation à la Guyane Française et à la Nouvelle Calédonie, 1868–1870, p. 59, and Clair (1990: 49).

42. Pierre (1982: 24–27).

43. Another thousand or so women would be sent to New Caledonia; the majority in each case were sentenced under the recidivist laws of 1885 (Clair 1990: 39). Mortality among them was remarkably high: 23–54 percent in New Caledonia and 44–69 percent in French Guiana. For a statistical breakdown, see Krakovitch (1990b: 283–95), Clair (1990: 36–39), and Devèze (1965: 136), as well as the exhaustive early studies of Orgeas (1885, 1886).

44. Clair (1990: 23).

45. Devèze (1965: 142).

46. “La Verité sur les pénitenciers de la Guyane,” L'Economiste Française 21 (25 October 1882): 292–93, together with a lengthy rebuttal letter from the governor to the minister, 14 December 1862. CAOM H bagne 4.

47. 10 September 1856. CAOM H bagne 14.

48. From Bollot, “Un Pénitencier doit être une véritable maison de santé morale,” 1868. CAOM H bagne 4.

49. Gordon Wright (1983: 95). The shipment of about fifty Metropolitan women to French Guiana during the suspension of European arrivals (1867–1885) represents an interesting exception (Clair 1990: 36). Isabelle Merle (1995: 63) suggests that this redirection of convicts of European extraction to

50. Merle de Beaufont to minister, 21 December 1864, pp. 88, 102–3. CAOM H bagne 4.

51. Bollot, “Un Pénitencier doit être une véritable maison de santé morale,” 1868. CAOM H bagne 4.

52. “Etude sur la transportation à la Guyane.” CAOM Guyane L1 (08). Although undated, the draft copy (with many sections amended or crossed out, and footnotes added) makes references to the thirty-year history of the overseas bagne, which would place it in the early 1880s. Judging from content and style, it appears to be a draft of Orgeas's extended demographic study (1885 and 1886).

53. From Eribon (1991: 237), quoting a 1975 Le Monde interview with Foucault.

54. In this sense the penal colony serves as an example of an alternative modernity constructed around institutionalized failure, a place where governmental norms are suggested but not applied.