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Categoria: Prison Islands

The colonial prison, between the Cabrit island of Les Saintes in Guadeloupe and the penitentiary colony in French Guiana

Posted on | By caparicio

The “colonial prison”[1] is not only the place of detention found in the colonies but also an organisation subject to the specificity reserved for their administration. In the same way that there is a colonial penal code (abrogated on 8 January 1877), there is a system of internal penalties in the colonies, which will be distinguished from that concerning convicts sentenced to forced labour in metropolitan France who are sent to serve their sentence in the colonies. “Colonial prison” is therefore an ambivalent term. Depending on whether it refers to the origin (in relation to criminal acts and court judgements affecting the strictly colonial population) or the destination (the colony of French Guiana, where all those sentenced under the Transportation Act of 30 May 1854 were sent – “colonials” and “nationals” together), it has two different meanings. It is a colonial prison in the sense that it is an institution operating from metropolitan France to the colonies via the Ministry of the Navy and the colonies – but whose model is conditioned by the Ministries of Justice and the Interior. It is also a colonial prison in the sense that its ‘Creole’ identity is marked – but with contradictory tensions between local and national interests. This ambiguity is compounded by a doubling of the status of “simple” colonies to “penal” colonies.

In the aftermath of the abolition of slavery, a typical case is that of Guadeloupe, in the midst of a social transformation with the arrival of a workforce of “engagés” of Indian origin accused of arson and vagrancy, alongside freed blacks who were in the news for robbery and violence or rebellion. It is in the continuity of these repeated criminal cases (which do not necessarily have the reality that the press and public opinion want to give them) that the prison service of the colony is restructured by decree of 26 December 1868[2] . The correctional nature of the sentences handed down, as well as the difficulties in introducing prison work, seem to follow the same evolution as in France. There is not a single statistic that does not show a clear analogy with the judicial and penitentiary situation in metropolitan France. It is in the type of population targeted, the reaction it provokes, and the penal and prison system envisaged that the difference should be sought.

Judging only by the difference between “Creole” and “European” rations, the balance is unequal[3] – or would be if there were “European” rationers.  For  there  were  no  whites  in  Guadeloupean prisons, as

shown by a statistical report from the prison in Les Saintes in 1884, where all the prisoners were Creoles (58) or of Indian origin (62)[4] . This penitentiary, constituted as a “house of force and correction” from its creation in 1852 until its closure in 1905, was built on the islet of Cabrit to concentrate three categories of convicts: those sentenced to more than one year’s imprisonment, those sentenced to forced labour and those sentenced to imprisonment. The rejection of its penal population partly explains the choice of removal to an islet, but also that of allowing the colony (when it gave up on perpetuating its ephemeral “jail” set up on a pontoon) to “transport” its “African and Asian” prisoners to the jail in French Guiana, instead of letting them serve their sentences at the place where they were sentenced by the courts, as is the case in France: aggravation of the sentence having the effect of introducing into French Guiana, alongside the category of ‘convicts’, the exclusively racial and colonial category of ‘prisoner’.

The iniquity of Guianese imprisonment[5] can be gauged by examining the fate of Guadeloupean (but also Martiniquean and Reunionese) convicts who are sent away on average once a year from the penitentiary-depot of the Îlet à Cabrit. Despite the legally recognised need, at first, to establish a legal distinction between the transported first-class convicts and the second-class colonial prisoners, the penitentiary administration came, in fact, to confuse them, in terms of clearing work (reputed to be “the most painful of colonisation”) as well as in terms of food rations and punishments. Although the straw hat worn by the convicts was replaced by a grey felt hat on the heads of the prisoners, and the initials RC (Réclusionnaires Coloniaux – Colonial Prisoners) were sewn onto the left sleeve of the latter’s jacket, the two categories were nonetheless grouped together, according to criteria that were clearly ethnic and not penal, in the most deadly camps, in particular Sainte-Marie, “for the digging of certain ditches that it would have been dangerous to have whites carry out”[6] .

Éric Fougère

[1] See Éric Fougère, La Prison coloniale en Guadeloupe (îlet à Cabrit, 1852-1905), Matoury (Guyane), Ibis Rouge Éditions, 2010.

[2] It succeeds that of 1852, on the organisation of colonial prisons, and of 1858, on the internal regime of prisons.

[3] Under the terms of the 1868 decree, rations were broken down as follows : bread 660 g, or cassava flour 60 cl, cod 125 g, vegetables 100 g (Creole prisoners); bread 625 g, fresh meat seasoned with 12 grams of fat 250 g or salted meat 200 g, vegetables seasoned with 12 grams of butter 120 g (for prisoners of European origin or with “European habits”).

[4] An average for the years 1886 to 1891 indicates a so-called “ethnographic” distribution of 62.2% Creole convicts (blacks or mulattoes), 30.5% of Asian origin (Indians), 0.6% of African origin (indentured servicemen), 0.4% of European or metropolitan origin, and 3.3% of various origins (in particular from the English colonies). See Armand Corre, Le Crime en pays créoles, esquisse d’ethnographie criminelle, Paris, Stock, 1889 and, by the same author, L’Ethnographie criminelle d’après les observations et les statistiques recueillies dans les colonies françaises, Paris, C. Reinwald & Cie, 1984.

[5] This is to be distinguished from the seclusion applied to convicts as a disciplinary measure on Île Saint-Joseph, one of the Salvation Islands (Guiana).

[6] Letter from Bonard, Governor of Guiana, to the Minister of the Colonies (18 November 1854). Archives nationales d’Outre-Mer, Colonies series H 45.

Ler tudo The colonial prison, between the Cabrit island of Les Saintes in Guadeloupe and the penitentiary colony in French Guiana

The “bad subjects” of Désirade (1763-1767)

Posted on | By caparicio

Désirade is an island of about twenty square kilometres located not far from Grande-Terre in Guadeloupe, to which it is administratively attached. What is known about it from official sources begins with the relegation of lepers who were abducted there from 1728[1] . A Creole micro-society[2] (“cotton farmers”, “petits-blancs” (white trash), mulattoes, slaves) had been living there for three decades when another event crossed its history on the fringes of the major trade flows (it then had about fifty families[3]): under the terms of an ordinance of July 1763, Louis XV and his minister Choiseul intended to deal with “young people of bad conduct”. One aim was to clear the houses of strength where these “dangerous subjects” of the family were normally kept.

There is a whole tradition. Under the Regency, “engagés” (forcibly enlisted) were sent to colonise the West Indies and Louisiana (Île Dauphine), allowing some of them to escape from the galleys. This experiment was initiated, further back in time, by letters patent authorising the use of criminals released from prison to go and populate Canada (1540-41) and then the Golden Islands (Bagaud, Port-Cros, Levant) decreed to be lands of asylum (1550). We also recall the plans to found a French colony in Brazil, on what is now Villegagnon Island, in Guanabara Bay (1555-60) by recruiting some of the candidates from the criminal element (and in particular vagrants and false convicts), and then on Sable Island (off the coast of Nova Scotia) with some sixty convicts, of whom only a dozen survived (1598-1603)…

If the 1763 text states that “the king allows” young people […] whose irregular conduct would have obliged their parents to request their export to the colonies to be sent to the island of Désirade, it is because, unlike the practice up to that point, these young people were not tried but targeted by “lettres de cachet » (sealed letters) on the simple accusation of a private individual who wanted to obtain an order of arrest, which remained at the discretion of the authorities after an investigation. They are not prisoners of justice but prisoners of the police. In La Désirade, therefore, the aim was not to colonise but to correct. Hence the disciplinary orientation: the “bad subjects” would be distinguished by class as they were “recognised as being more or less reformed” on the basis of “life certificates”. The last difference, this time explaining the military organisation, was that they were “contained” by a company of infantry responsible for surveillance under the orders of a commander who, if necessary, would have them “put in solitary confinement in irons on hands and feet”.

The design of the establishment, a prison within a prison, gives it the appearance of a camp, not only by its construction (a masonry prison, six huts where the “bad subjects” are locked up each night in a district of the island called Les Galets, planted perimeter walls and sentry posts) but also by its functioning: three sergeant-inspectors took roll calls every night, as did three majors, “at unspecified times” – which did not prevent the escape of four presumed drowned prisoners or that of five others, two of whom were “brought back”. But Villejoin, appointed governor and commander of the camp on the spot, was the first to denounce the conditions of what he called “filthy idleness”: “The ration is not enough for the majority. […] many are barefoot and shirtless three quarters of the time; very few receive news from their families and even fewer receive help. Obliged to “make their submission” (pay the captivity pension), some families forget to pay it. But the theoretical equality of treatment was far from being followed. The best-rated, often gentlemen, benefited from favours: they ate at the table of the governor or the officers of the garrison, and had money lent to them…

On board corvettes or liners, the “bad subjects” were embarked by the dozen from Rochefort, bound for Martinique and Basse-Terre in Guadeloupe. At each stage (we must also count those who brought them from all corners of the kingdom and from the prisons of Saint-Lazare or Bicêtre in Paris), the passengers were kept prisoners (an average of six months in the Rochefort prison, and up to three years for some). They were provincials (only two were Parisians, two others were from the colonies), denounced mainly for “violence” and debts (especially gambling). The average age is around 25 (the youngest is 16, the oldest around 40). Some of them were from the lower or middle nobility of the robe or of the sword, others belonged to families of craftsmen and small traders, and others belonged to the bourgeoisie. When the establishment closed in 1767, there were about forty of them, awaiting departure from Rochefort, who had not been deported (dead, escaped, repentant, “revoked” at the request of their families, or because the shipments had stopped) out of a total of 139 files that were closed without follow-up or refused[4] .

As early as 1765, when it had not been in existence for a month, there was no longer any belief in the establishment. The correspondence between the colonial authorities and the metropolis, between the provincial intendants and the Ministry of the Interior and the port of Rochefort and the Colonial Office, emphasised at least three points: excessive expenditure (in consideration of such a limited number of “boarders”); the absurdity of a system of “correction” which made Villejoin, who became his detractor, say that the good bad subjects “are confused with some who are apostilled [noted] as people without hope, who have too many vices of heart […]. It is not with such people that one will draw feelings and, overwhelmed  by  misery,  one  will find very few resources at home to return to”; the unworthiness of

of their offspring resurfaces, and their guilt rubs off”[5] “because of the lack of interest shown by them in the fate of their progeny. Of the 53 who returned to Rochefort in the middle of winter (and one of whom died during the crossing), 12 were again prisoners until their parents took them away. Four of them were only released in the spring, without any response from their families to the letter asking them to claim them.

Éric Fougère

[1] See Éric Fougère, Les Îles malades, Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2018.

[2] The only difference is that the monoculture is cotton, which is much less profitable than sugar cane.

[3] Difficult to estimate accurately before the first censuses.

[4] See Bernadette and Philippe Rossignol, ‘Les “mauvais sujets” de la Désirade’, Bulletin de la société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe n° 153 (May-August 2009), p. 92-97.

[5] Éric Fougère, Des indésirables à la Désirade, Matoury, Ibis Rouge, 2008, p. 104.

Ler tudo The “bad subjects” of Désirade (1763-1767)

The origins of modern relegation and deportation: island exile in Roman antiquity

Posted on | By caparicio

The historical contribution of islands to prisons goes back to antiquity. The Romans distinguished between relegatio ad insulam and deportatio in insulam[1] . Beyond the strictly legal content (deportatio, which caused the convicted person to lose his civil rights and the property of his estate, was in theory a perpetual punishment and was pronounced by the emperor, unlike relegatio, which was pronounced by a governor and did not have the same rigour), we can see the articulation of two notions that the legislations will take up when it comes to criminal law and islands: mobility in remoteness (relegatio ad), immobility in confinement (deportatio in). In this respect, a gradation of punishments is observed: temporary or perpetual relegation (outside a city or province), relegation to an island, deportation to an island, death penalty[2] . There are also three kinds of exile: banning from specific places (in particular Rome), exclusion from any place other than a specially designated place, confinement to an island (not specifying which one before sentencing).

It was possible to relegate, if not deport, anywhere as long as it was far away, as shown by the example of Ovid in the Pont-Euxin (Black Sea). The island punishment was no less practiced, also marked by distance, with the deportation to the Kerkennah archipelago (Tunisia) of Sempronius Gracchus, lover of Julia, daughter of Augustus, who was also relegated by her father to Pandataria (Ventotene), in the Pontine archipelago (where her mother joined her), before dying in Reggio di Calabria five years later in 14 AD. Tiberius exiled Julia’s daughter there, as well as other women of the imperial family: Octavia, wife of Nero, Flavia Domitilla, wife of a rival of Domitian, Orestilla, wife of Caligula, Julia Livilla, Agrippina the Younger (daughters of Germanicus), exiled to the island of Ponza, Julia Vipsania, in the archipelago of Tremiti. All of them (except Flavia Domitilla) for matters of morals (adultery, abortion, debauchery, impiousness) but probably also for the same reasons, political, explaining the sending to Capri of Lucilla, sister of Commodus, and Crispinia, his wife, accused of conspiracy against the emperor, or of Seneca in Corsica on the grounds of his adultery with Julia Livillia, but also victim of intrigues in the entourage of Claudius[3] . In 417, the first Western Roman emperor, Priscus Attalus, was exiled to Lipari (in the Aeolian Islands, where Caracalla’s wife, Plautilla, had been exiled and then murdered), accused of usurpation. The last emperor, Romulus Augustulus, was sent by Odoacre to Nisida, in front of Naples.

From Tacitus (Annals) and Suetonius (Lives of the Twelve Caesars), among others, we know what use Tiberius made of the Sporades (island of Kinaros) and especially the Cyclades as places of exile: Seriphos (where Cassius Severus, a political opponent, and Vistilia, a matron accused of prostitution, were shipped), Kythnos (where Junius Silanus, a proconsul accused of embezzlement, was relegated), Lesbos (for Junius Gallio, because he had proposed a change of etiquette that did not respect precedence), Amorgos (where the proconsul Vibius Serenus was deported), Andros (Flaccus, prefect of Egypt), but also Gyaros and Donoussa, which seem to have been reserved for the most severe banishments[4] and of which historiography has not retained much because of three factors, the first of which is the strategy of oblivion that presides over banishment (when the deportees are not suppressed in one way or another – murder, misery… – at the end of their island exile). Another explanation comes from the fact that this strategy, with some exceptions (notably that of some four thousand freedmen deported to Sardinia in 19 AD because of their “Egyptian and Judaic superstitions”, and who were charged with repressing banditry there), mainly concerned isolated individuals about whom historians only spoke (third explanation) when these individuals had some title to notoriety.

If the fate of each of the Roman convicts taken separately is not, at least for them, anecdotal, we are nevertheless faced with the observation of a disparity of insular experiences that cannot be globalised. What do the lives of John the Evangelist on Patmos and Agrippa Postumus, grandson of Augustus, on the island of Pianosa have in common, for example? What is there in common between islands, mostly very small, where everything was deemed to be lacking (Kinaros, Seriphos, Gyaros…) and others where rich Romans had built holiday homes (in Capri, Pandatera, Nisida…)? One last observation remains, however: the Romans seem to have invented (even if drafts of it could be found in the Hellenic period[5])  the idea of prison-islands whose use, still empirical, is at the same time already systematic.

Éric Fougère

[1] See Vincent Jolivet, “L’exil sur les îles dans l’Antiquité romaine”, in Brigitte Marin dir., Les Petites Îles de Méditerranée occidentale, Marseille, Éditions Gaussen, 2021, p. 172-175.

[2] See Yann Rivière, “L’interdictio aqua et igni et la deportatio sous le Haut-Empire romain”, in Philippe Blaudeau, Exil et relégation, les tribulations du sage et du saint durant l’Antiquité romaine et chrétienne (I -VIere siècles après J.- C.), Paris, De Boccard, 2008.C.), Paris, De Boccard, 2008, and, by the same author, “La relégation et le retour des relégués dans l’Empire romain (I -IIIere siècles), in Claudia Moatti, Wolfgang Kaiser, Christophe Pébarthe dir., Le monde de l’itinérance en Méditerranée de l’Antiquité à l’époque moderne, Bordeaux-Pessac, Ausonius Éditions, 2009, p. 535-570.

[3] See Roselyne Immongault Nomewa, ‘Les exilées romaines et l’espace répulsif dans l’empire romain : l’apport des sources littéraires latines’, CHA, 2014, online at https://www.academia.edu

[4] See Étienne Wolf, “Ambivalence of the islands in Roman culture: the example of the life of Tiberius”, Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, 2008, 1, p. 139-145.

[5] See Patrice Brun, Les Archipels Égéens dans l’Antiquité grecque (V -IIee siècle avant notre ère), Annales littéraires de l’université de Besançon, Institut des sciences et techniques de l’Antiquité, Centre de recherches d’histoire ancienne, vol. 157 (1996), p. 23.

Ler tudo The origins of modern relegation and deportation: island exile in Roman antiquity

The insular political deportation in France

Posted on | By caparicio

When Solzhenitsyn wrote The Gulag Archipelago, we thought that the title was brilliant, before asking ourselves why. The Gulag had its beginnings on the Solovki Archipelago, just as the Tsarist penal colony had made Sakhalin Island a place of choice, but Russian deportation was naturally continental, the antithesis of the British deportation to Australia, Not only was it associated with insularity, but it also took root on Norfolk Island and in Tasmania, in a logic of over-insularisation, the equivalent of which would be the over-remoteness of the “labour reform” camps in Siberia. It is precisely from Siberia, an arch-continental block, and more precisely from Kolyma, that the explanation for the apparent paradox of a representation of Soviet camps in an archipelago comes to us. In his Kolyma Stories, Varlam Shalamov (‘enemy of the people’ who spent seventeen years in the camps) almost never uses the word ‘continent’ to refer to ‘free’ lands:

In Kolyma, the central provinces are still called the “continent” (…). The connection by sea, the Vladivostok-Magadan sea line, the landing on bare rocks, all this was very similar to the pictures of the past, of Sakhalin. This is why Vladivostok is considered a city of the mainland, although Kolyma is never called an island[1] .

The camps would therefore only be an archipelago a priori insofar as their lived, if not fantasised, geography (which we will distinguish from ‘real’ geography) is that of a negative continent in mirror image, or rather by default, designed to designate deprivation (particularly of freedom) by analogy. This way of using space for the purposes of penal or prison representation is what is at stake in the French ultra-marine deportations.

This is mentioned in the 1810 Penal Code, where deportation must take place “outside the continental territory” (Article 17). In the absence of a specific place, deportation remains theoretical, as can already be seen in the precedent of a project to deport recidivist beggars to Madagascar, which was drawn up by the first Penal Code in 1793. As if the word “continental” (which can be explained in part by the fact that Napoleonic France was a European empire at the time[2] ) had created the image of islands to which the deportees were to be sent, subsequent deportation projects were logically directed towards Bourbon Island (Reunion Island, Cirque de Salazie), and then towards Mayotte (the islands of Pamandzi and Dzaoudzi). Without result: deportation continued to be applied on national territory in citadels (Mont-Saint-Michel, Doullens, and later still on Belle-Île).

Historically, France has a long tradition of deportation to “the islands”: in Désirade, where “bad subjects” denounced by “lettres de cachets » (sealed letters) were the subject of an ordinance of 1763 which kept them prisoners in a palisaded camp until 1767[3] ; in the Seychelles (and later in the Comoros), by virtue of a senatus-consult of 1801 settling the fate of those accused of the Rue Saint-Nicaise attack[4] , in Corsica and on the island of Caprera (priests hostile to Napoleon), on the island of Elba (insurgents from Saint-Domingue and Guadeloupe[5] , in a cross-over between the metropolis and the colonies that is a secret of the history of slavery)…

But there was also a whole range of doctrinal opposition to deportation, in addition to the lack of islands of choice of location. Barbé-Marbois (himself a former Fructidor deportee) and Tocqueville (author of Écrits sur le système pénitentiaire) were opposed to deportation, the former because it was contradictory to the idea that a sentence should be brought closer to the place of the crime[6] , and the latter because he was in favour of a prison reform where the model was solitary confinement and not deportation. The turning point came from a double political event: the June 1848 insurrections and Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup d’état.

The urgent reaction was not only the number of those to be tried, unprecedented since the Revolution, but also the abolition of the death penalty (article 5 of the 1848 Constitution) for political crimes. After the law of 24 January 1850, which “transported” them to the penitentiary-camp of Lambessa (Algeria), then to French Guiana (Îlet la Mère and Île du Diable), the law of 8 June of the same year chose the Îles Marquises and introduced two degrees of deportation: “simple” (already contained in the Penal Code), and “aggravated” (known as “fortified enclosure”).

The novelty (prefigured by the deportation projects to Bourbon Island and then Mayotte) is the introduction of a detention into the deportation, according to the concept of “fortified enclosure” derived from that of “citadel”. Thus, not content with correlating the place of punishment and the punishment of the place in such a way as to confer all the remoteness possible on exile, the device associates confinement. This made Victor Hugo say, during the legislative debates (April 1850): “We combine climate, exile and prison: climate gives its malignity, exile its burden, prison its despair; instead of one executioner we have three. The death penalty is replaced… (…) say with us: the death penalty is restored.”

Faced with an even greater number of convicts, following the events of the Commune in 1870, it was sufficient, under the terms of the law of 23 March 1872, to substitute the Isle of Pines for Nuku Hiva (simple deportation) and the Ducos peninsula for the Vaitahu valley (fortified deportation) in order to transfer the convicts to the island, to substitute the Isle of Pines for Nuku Hiva (simple deportation) and the Ducos peninsula for the Vaitahu valley (deportation in a fortified enclosure) to transfer the principle of penal insularity (an abstract space characterised by borders) coupled with prison insularity as a concrete place of confinement to New Caledonia[7] .

Éric Fougère

[1] V. Shalamov, Stories from Kolyma, Lagrasse, Éditions Verdier, 2003, p. 900.

[2] But the banishment provided for by the Penal Code (Article 8) is served “outside the territory of the empire” (Article 32).

[3] See Éric Fougère, Des Indésirables à la Désirade, Matoury (Guyane), Ibis Rouge Éditions, 2008, and Bernadette and Philippe Rossignol, ‘Les mauvais sujets de la Désirade’, Bulletin de la société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe n° 153 (May-August 2009).

[4] See Jean Destrem, Les Déportations du Consulat et de l’Empire, Paris, Jeanmaire, 1885.

[5] See Yves Benot, La Démence coloniale sous Napoléon, Paris, La Découverte, 1991.

[6] “(…) to remove to immense distances, is to make one lose sight of the memory of the crime, at the same time as one loses sight of the criminal. François de Barbé-Marbois, Observations sur les votes de quarante et un conseils généraux de départements, concernant la déportation des forçats libérés, Paris, Imprimerie royale, 1828, p. 61.

[7] See Éric Fougère, Île-prison, bagne et déportation, Paris, L’Harmattan, 2002.

Ler tudo The insular political deportation in France

Asinara Island: a concentration of health and prison insularity in Sardinia

Posted on | By caparicio

Before becoming a national park in 2002, the island of about 50 km2 , which lies at the north-western end of the Gulf of Asinara (Sardinia), experienced all the forms of confinement that its relative isolation allowed, some 500 metres from the islet of Piana, separated from the peninsula of Stintino by approximately another half kilometre. This began in 1885, with the creation of an agricultural penal colony in Cala d’Oliva, on the heights of the island’s village, and a quarantine lazaretto a little further south, in Cala Reale. The difficulties raised by the bill presented to the Chamber of Deputies by the President of the Council and Minister of the Interior, Agostino Depretis: the fate of the island’s fishermen and shepherds and the lack of water, were solved by building a cistern and expropriating the inhabitants. The workforce was made up of the penal population brought in convoys of 10 to 40 convicts who were harnessed to the construction of the lazaretto until 1897 (it closed in 1939) and a new prison which was soon built in Fornelli in the south of the island, where the territory was divided under the dual jurisdiction of the Ministry of the Navy and the Interior.

Between December 1915 and March 1916, with the disembarkation of 24,000 prisoners of war from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the “health station”, organised for a maximum of 1,500 patients, was unable to cope with the cholera that broke out on board the maritime convoys at the same time as in the Albanian transit camp of Valona. The epidemic kills 7 to 8,000 prisoners spread over several points of the island according to the camps that are hastily set up (forcing the penal colony to concentrate in the north of the island): in Fornelli, Stretti, Campu Perdu, Tumbarino. The location of this last camp was used to supply the colony with wood, while in Santa Maria, Campu Perdu and Stretti, farming and breeding (and fishing) were practiced: 230 hectares (of olive trees, vines, cereals and other food crops) were cultivated at the beginning of the XXe century not only by the colony – a life-size prison inspired by the one set up in the Tuscan archipelago on the island of Pianosa, which was constituted as a penal colony in 1858, and then on the island of Gorgon in 1871 – but also thanks to the arrival of 10,000 other prisoners of war after the cholera epidemic.

In 1937, the eldest daughter of the Negus Haile Selassie, captured by the Italian colonial authorities, was interned on the Asinara, as were several hundred Ethiopian personalities during the second war of occupation of that country. The Mussolini confino politico thus revived the relegatio ad insulam of Roman antiquity by interning opponents, as a police and security measure, on islands with a history of exile, in particular Ponza and Ventotene in the Pontine Islands archipelago off the coast of Lazio, or even Ustica, Favignana, Lampedusa, Lipari, Pantelleria and Tremiti. In the 1970s, the turning point in Asinara was the transfer of some of the most important leaders of the Red Brigades to the Fornelli prison, in the building, reconditioned for the occasion, where the penal agricultural colony had initially been the place of detention for about fifty convicts, whose number increased tenfold: Now (in the mid-1970s), there are more than a hundred in the Fornelli prison, twice that number in the casa di lavoro (“open” regime during the day), the remaining small hundred or so in ten sections (diramazioni), including Casa Bianche, the northernmost one (where sconsegnati benefiting from semi-liberty are housed), which is added to the existing “annexes” (for sexual crimes, among others, in Tumbarino, and for international drug trafficking in Santa Maria).

Following a series of causes – the controversial authority of the new prison director (tried and then convicted for corruption), the right to visit and the very severe conditions of detention, foiled escape plans, rebellions that were more or less put down, pressure from the local population and public opinion, the taking hostage by the Red Brigades, still at large, of a judge in Rome to obtain the closure of the Fornelli district – the activists were transferred again at the end of 1980; This did not prevent the Asinara from continuing to be the “high security” prison of organised crime (Sicilian Mafia and Camorra) until its closure in 1997. At the beginning of the 1980s, Cala d’Oliva, which remained a “central” prison, became the “fortified” prison of Toto Riina.

For more than a hundred years (almost forty of which were spent demanding the conversion of the island into a natural park), what makes Asinara special, chosen almost by accident alongside the seven other agricultural colonies in Sardinia, is not only the combination of its sanitary and penitentiary functions but also, paradoxically (given its remoteness), its involuntary immersion in a history (world war and colonisation, fascism, terrorism and banditry…) which exposed him to all the regimes, alternately civil and military, in terms of discipline (workshops and agricultural colony) and surveillance and detention (semi-liberty, reclusion, relegation, quarantine, internment in “concentration” camps for prisoners of war). And this very exposure to history also explains its recent metamorphosis… A complete reversal of paradigm indeed: visiting the Asinara on a “little train” that swirls to the rhythm of the calas, the tourist is asked to keep a good distance from the donkeys, which are left entirely free to cross the roadway which cuts the whole island from south to north. Endemic to the island, the breed of albino donkeys is considered “vulnerable” because of what makes it a “protected species” while at the same time contributing to this vulnerability: inbreeding. So much so that, not content with transforming the donkey from a domestic animal into a new island emblem stamped “nature” (at the cost of a false etymological connection[1] ), we have switched into an axiology of “Animal Reserve” and tourist attraction where the health station has given way to the veterinary station and the prison space to the environmental Eden.

[1] None of the Latin names of the island (Herculis Insula, Sinuaria or even Aenaria) allow the recognition of asinus (i.e. donkey).

Éric Fougère

COSSU A., MONBALLIU X., TORRE A. (1994), L’isola dell’Asinara, Carlo Delfino editore, Sassari.

DODERO G. (1999), Storia della medicina e della sanità pubblica in Sardegna, Aipsa edizioni, Cagliari.

GUTIERREZ M., MATTONE A., VAISECCHI F. (1998), L’isola dell’Asinara: l’ambiente, la storia, il parco, Poliedro, Nuoro.

GORGOLINI L. (2011), I dannati dell’Asinara, l’odissea dei prigioneri austro-ungarici nella Prima guerra mondiale, Utet editore, Milano.

Ler tudo Asinara Island: a concentration of health and prison insularity in Sardinia