Spring Fresco, Akrotiri, Thera (Santorini)

Germán Carrasco, La insidia del sol sobre las cosas (1997).

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French Guiana emerged as an early favorite for the placement of a French penal colony. […] Daniel Lescallier […] authored a work entitled […] (Exposition of the means by which to develop French Guiana). In it he points to the example the British have set in exporting offenders to the colonies […]. Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” […] The era of the French penal colony was now open; the new French Empire had begun its Botany Bay, even as the British original [penal colony in Australia] wound to a close. […] The double logic of the British system also drives the French imagination; proposals alternatively concentrate on a desire to punish criminals and rid the Metropole of their presence, on the one hand, and a hope of furthering the work of colonial expansion and economic progress, on the other. Within this logic the focus shifts between the need to colonize, the need to punish […].

In the case of France, it shimmers with colonial fantasy, allowing future Australias to emerge on tropical horizons. […] [T]he penal colony requires location. The specificity of the site matters; it is the very place that is to enact punishment […]. The penal colony is in essence a geographic technique […]. But despite frequent outcries and sensational reports, the French Guiana penal establishment continued to exist through the end of World War II. […] 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. […] In sensational accounts these tropics incessantly punish […]: “Fever and dysentery get every man! Clouds of buzzing mosquitoes and fire ants sting your aching body while you labor […].” As the commandant of the bagne would inform convicts on their arrival, “The real guards here are the jungle and the sea.” […] Many of the prisoners, after all, were from urban environments […]. The terror of Devil’s Island takes shape amid metaphoric invocations of the jungle and of the savage […].

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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.” 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. […]

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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.

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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.”

Brand here means “trademark” as well as “scar,” indicating purpose, function, and maker.

To be remembered as a penal colony is to be remembered not only as a prison, an exotic place of horror, but also as a colony, the object and product of another. […] Modernizing France, a convulsive patchwork of provinces, cities, farms, and factories, casts its shadow overseas. […] The penal colony takes shape at a crucial moment in European colonial understandings of place and labor. Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire […]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor […], not only in French Guiana, but also throughout colonies built on the plantation model.

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