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] .
[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.