Category: Prison Islands

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.

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.