Wild Coast

by John Gimlette

  Two years later another experiment began, as bold as any before.

  Just beyond the Dégrad Chinois a great scheme still rises out of the reeds. It covers an area of almost seven acres and is enclosed by a stone wall, sixteen feet tall. Everything around it has been cleared away, and so this structure stands alone and gaunt. Apart from a small industrial chimney there are no features to it – no windows or doors – it’s just a vast, lifeless block of diminishing parallel lines.

  The only way in is through a small gateway round the side. The gate itself is made of iron and painted prison-grey. Above it are the words ‘CAMP DE LA TRANSPORTATION’.

  The idea of transporting unwanted people to Guyane wasn’t entirely new. The French Revolution had often sent its enemies here. Among them were seventeen deputies, Marie-Antoinette’s lawyers, the president of the Conseil des Anciens, and the playwright Collot d’Herbois. In all, perhaps a thousand came. The likelihood of them dying here was so great that banishment became known as la guillotine sèche, the chop without the mess.

  The concept of a penal colony was revived in 1848. By then, France had over 6,000 prisoners locked up in its penal system or le bagne (the word came from the ‘bathhouses’ once used as lock-ups for prisoners of war). Now reformers were beginning to question the utility of such a punishment. What benefit was there in able-bodied men rotting away and then emerging worse than ever? It was English jurisprudence that provided a solution. Transportation, wrote Sir William Blackstone, offered the prospect of ‘a new homeland, a new existence, hopes of fortune and the prospect of forgiveness’. It would be a scientific solution to the moral decline of France. Men would be transformed by hard work, civilised and cured, and at the same time they’d replace the Africans and bring new hope to a benighted colony. Guyane would be ‘Le Botany Bay français,’ rebuilt by the ‘slaves of the law’.

  What’s more, Louis-Napoleon liked the idea. His coup d’état had created another 27,000 detainees, and here was a chance to kill several birds with one stone. In 1850 he signed an order for the creation of la colonie pénitentiaire. Within eight years the great bagne at Rochefort had closed, and over 8,000 bagnards had been transferred to Guyane. What was now needed was a new settlement, designed especially to punish. In 1858 a site was selected at St-Laurent du Maroni, and later that year building began.

  Soon, rising out of the reeds, was a vast mill for processing people.

  The camp still feels like a factory, empty and abandoned. I went there several times during my stay in St-Laurent, sometimes with the actors, sometimes alone. Now these visits have all merged into one. Only the light ever changed. There was no view of the outside world, and none of the usual punctuation that marks out the day. The symmetry was devastating; the sharp lines, the rows of barracks and the rectangle all around. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be boxed up in here for a week, a year or even for life, breathing hot sand and never knowing anything but the walls and the sky.

  The barrack blocks were like silos for human beings. Housing over 3,000 convicts, everything about them had a dull industrial clank. They had concrete walls and iron roofs, iron bolts, iron doors and then iron stairs leading up to another warehouse, just like the one below. It was here that men were broken down. They’d already lost their names and become a number. Now their lives would be reduced to a peg on the wall. The pegs are still there, although the numbers have faded. They, and the striped uniforms and straw hats, were all a man had left. Until the 1930s he didn’t even have his own hammock, just a stretch of canvas, shared with everyone else. ‘Sans dignité,’ as Jean-Luc put it, ‘et sans futur.’

  Although every surface was now crusted with mould and damp, a system had survived. The erasure of personality had been so thorough that there was no sign left of the men who’d lived here: no words, no art, just a mottled wash of pink and grey. Between 1858 and 1946 over 67,000 bagnards had passed through the camp. These were not ordinary people but France’s most colourful and violent criminals. Among them were assassins, gangsters, psychopaths, forgers, pimps and racketeers. Most famous of all was Henri Charrière, alias Papillon. But there was also Dieudonne, of the Amiens gang, the first thug to use a machine gun in France; Baratand, a millionaire who brought Limoges out on strike when he was spared the guillotine for murder; and the Comte de Bérac, who’d killed the child he’d fathered by his maid. Then there was the man who lost his arm when his mistress bit it as he hurled her out of a window, and the barber who bludgeoned his wife’s lover with a bottle and then cut up his face with some shears. There was even the odd Englishman, such as George Seaton. ‘Even I, the effete socialite,’ he wrote, years later, ‘acquired a sinewy brutality … I slid back several centuries and obeyed the law that said, “If all else fails, I shall survive” …’

  Now all that remained of them were these stark units, built for bashing out new citizens and dismantling the old. With all its iron and parallels and tight-fitting hatches, the camp had been callously efficient. It may even have inspired later regimes, wanting to automate people or just make them vanish. Guyane at that time was still famously unhealthy. During the first thirty years of the penal colony disease claimed over half the convicts. The combination of confinement and humidity was lethal. In 1867 it was considered so insalubrious that whites weren’t sent at all, and until 1887 only Arabs and Annamites arrived. After that, however, death was treated as merely incidental to the experiment in hand. Malaria, yellow fever and dysentery all played their part. In some barracks men slept on perforated planks to drain away the fluids. Even in the 1920s one in ten men died each year.

  But production, rather than extermination, was always the object of this camp. Here men were channelled and sorted, and selected for work. Transportés, the regular convicts, wore red stripes, and relégués, or repeat offenders, wore blue. One lot went one way, the others went another. The great experiment, however, was always a failure. The convicts were never trusted with initiative, and the work they did was pointlessly brutal. In St-Laurent they dug holes or made bricks. I still have one of these bricks, which I found in the river. It’s stamped ‘AP’, or Administration Pénitentiaire. St-Laurent is built of bricks like this, all fabulously over-deployed, just to absorb the endless output.

  Was this what Blackstone had meant by ‘a new existence’? Or the ‘prospect of forgiveness’? It was almost as though, in St-Laurent, France had created the very antithesis of El Dorado: a city of mud, built to impoverish, in the worship of work.

  Along one side of the camp was a walled-off area, more abattoir than factory. One day Jean-Luc and I hired a guide from the town hall to take us inside. He was an Amerindian, bow-legged and stooped like a sturdy chair. With a large bunch of keys he led us through two armoured doors and a guardroom into a system of darkened pens and cages. Once whole consignments of men could be herded through here, and then the whole place flushed clean. Now everything smelt of bats, and across the concrete was a litter of droppings and plaster. This was where they brought the hard cases, said the Amerindian.

  ‘Y compris les évadés?’ asked Jean-Luc.

  ‘Oui,’ said the guide. Including anyone absent more than twelve hours.

  Out in the work camps, four out of five bagnards attempted escape, and on average 150 men a year were never seen again. That’s not to say they all found freedom. As the commandant told new arrivals, ‘The real guards here are the jungle and the sea.’ Meanwhile, the rest were hunted down by trackers. People like my grandparents, said the Amerindian, who were paid for every man they returned.

  Back on the camp, les évadés were known as ‘the returned horses’ (les chevaux de retour) and were funnelled through these gates. Ahead lay the consequences of their actions, set out in channels; the court, the cells and the quartier disciplinaire. Above each gate I could still make out the words all bagnards dreaded: BLOCKHAUS or TRIBUNAL MARITIME SPECIAL. These weren’t simply labels; they added to the sense of inevitability and process. In this court, said the Amerindian,
escape was generally punished with twelve months solitary, and even murder trials lasted no longer than a day.

  One gate here was marked ‘Libérés’. It led to a long, narrow yard, with cells around the edge and a concrete washtub in the middle. This is where the ‘free men’ served their sentences. They were some of the sadder characters in this tortured system. Although they’d already served their main sentence, the rule of doublage required that every man serve the same period all over again, as a ‘free man’ in the colony (and if his original sentence was more than seven years, he could never go back to France). Entrepreneurship was forbidden, and yet each was expected to support himself. Some worked as gold-washers, or orpailleurs, and a few made a living mounting butterflies, but over three-quarters of them died of malnutrition. It was almost as though, having survived their sentence, a long, slow death penalty still lay ahead. As the Amerindian put it, ‘Le bagne commence à la libération.’

  Turning the other way, we came to the punishment yards. Here, men were either herded into the blockhaus, a hundred at a time, or singled out and brutalised alone. In the blockhaus, every night, the bagnards were shackled to one of two central rails, and yet they still managed to punish themselves and each other. Tethered a few feet apart, the men would settle old scores by slashing at each other with tiny handmade knives. Or they might introduce the new boys to the love life of the colony, which was always swift and violent, and administered over the toilet. The little pen at the end of the room was known, said the Amerindian, as the chambre d’amour.

  It was better in the cells, with only the prospect of madness. There was no view out, and now the walls were bristly with fungus. Here, however, something of the bagnards had survived, at least in their scribbles. Not much of it made much sense. There were occasional dates (1934 was a big year for doodling), and one cell had a large picture of a frigate in full sail. In the ‘death row’ cells, someone had spent his last hours carving ‘ADIEU MAMAN’ in his plank. Others had opted simply for a name. PAPILLON was the most common, I noticed.

  Was any of this the work of Charrière? Maybe, said the guide, but there were butterflies everywhere.

  Perhaps that’s the key to Henri Charrière. I’ve always wondered whether he was as innocent as he insisted, or as heroic as he claimed. As autobiography, Papillon is magnificently improbable. (A hayseed from the Ardèche is convicted in 1931 of a murder he didn’t do and ends up in Guyane. There he is witty and resourceful, and finds himself at the heart of everything that happens. He escapes nine times, beds half a dozen women, leads mutinies, kills several people with great style and flourish, and then finally gets away in 1944. Meanwhile, he’s forgotten all about his wife and daughter in Paris and writes them out of the plot.) But it’s in the detail that Papillon falters, with our hero experiencing things that in reality he’s unlikely to have seen: ants eating men alive, oysters yielding a pearl every day, lunatics howling at the moon. That said, his descriptions are those of a man who was almost certainly here, and it’s likely that most of the stories he tells really did happen – but just not to him. According to one French researcher, the official record of Charrière’s sojourn shows only that he never got into trouble, and that he kept the latrines.

  That’s why it’s probably better to think of him as a collector of stories, rather than their hero. Il y avait des papillons partout, as the Amerindian would say. But Charrière hasn’t always been seen this way. In the 1960s his book sold over a million copies in France alone. One minister even blamed him for the country’s moral decay, along with mini-skirts and pop. Charrière would have enjoyed all this, being at the heart of a real revolt. There’s a memorable picture of him, taken in 1969, four years before his death. He’s back in the Ardèche, wearing a cream polo-neck jumper, looking sleek and self-assured, every bit the novelist.

  At the far end of the secure quarters was a killing machine. All that remained of it were five pads of concrete. Like the penal colony itself, the guillotine was supposed to have been a rational solution to the conundrum of punishment. Science would give barbarism a spurious humanity. Here there had been three devices, each one well greased and tested every week. The last time one was used was 1942. The condemned man was an Arab who’d killed a local woman while out on parole. For weeks he’d tried to cheat the machine by stealing pins and pushing them deep into his chest. But then the day came, and the final meal and litre of wine. Before he was decapitated, the Arab was ordered to sign a prison discharge, just to complete the papers.

  Around the yard, the other prisoners were gathered. Perhaps Charrière was among them (he certainly described a scene like this). We’re all here to die, they’d think, but just at different rates. Then the blade fell, and the executioner reached down and picked up the head by the ears. ‘Au nom de la République,’ he proclaimed, ‘Justice est faite!’

  In the name of the Republic, justice has been done.

  Beyond the camp was an area known as ‘Little Paris’. It was like a slice of la Belle Epoque, served up in the tropics. Arranged around a tiny park were mansions in caramel and pink, civic halls, a palais de justice, and a hotel, magnificently ribbed in Ionic columns. Most of the mansions had louvred fronts, to suck in the breezes that came off the river, and every spare surface was either fluted or fringed or covered in friezes. There were gods and gymnasts tussling up in the pediments, and garlands of laurel over everything else. The best house of all went, of course, to le Directeur du Bagne. He was the most important man in the colony, and his residence had a pagoda roof, pyjama-striped stonework and a chorus of Ottoman arches. Here was the Third Empire at its most outrageous, demanding attention at whatever the cost.

  Little Paris was like the capital of a country that didn’t really exist. It even had its own national bank, I noticed, built by the convicts from imported stone. Across the front they’d built two grand staircases, like arms outstretched to scoop up the wealth. But the profits had never materialised. Right to the end les pénitenciers absorbed 90 per cent of the colony’s budget. Too late, France realised that there was no money to be made enslaving burglars and pimps. Most transportés just made their bricks and died. Few settled, and in the first decades only 10 per cent of them ever made it home. In economic terms, Guyane was just an expensive means of having men put down.

  The Amerindian said only the work camps had paid their own way. I asked him if there were any left.

  ‘Seulement St-Jean’, he said, ‘à dix kilomètres d’ici.’

  Then let’s go, said the actors, as soon as we can.

  According to the map, St-Jean was now a military camp.

  ‘No problem,’ said Jean-Luc. ‘I know an artist. He’ll get us in.’

  At first, it looked as though we were too late for St-Jean and that it was already deep in the realms of archaeology.

  Scattered along the riverbank was the wreckage of an ambitious past: old trucks, railway cars, giant canoes and the last straws of a great Amerindian carbet, or hall. There was also a huge clump of rust, nosing up out of the creepers, like some strange industrial growth. It was composed mostly of cranes and bulldozers, and right in the middle lived an old engineer and his long-suffering wife. They were like characters from a children’s story, with their patched clothes, an ancient gun and a dog that could sing. It’s so beautiful here, the wife told me, we never felt the need to move.

  They weren’t the only ones living in the ruins. Further along, under the trees, we came across a tribe of maroons. They said they’d been here for generations and that they manned all the boats that ran upriver. The failure of the penal colony had obviously suited them well, and they now had a village made of old iron beds and plundered bricks. But more surprising was the artist’s shack. It looked like several houses that had been smashed up and then thrown together as one. There was no door, so we scrambled in through a hole in the wall. Inside was a large area, waist-deep in feathers and oil cans, and lumps of cardboard. I also counted ten battered refrigerators. They’d clearly jus
t had a brawl, and some were huddled up one end, while others lay on their backs choked with landfill. I was beginning to wonder whether the artist had survived this riot when there was a rustle among the papers, and a spiky head appeared.

  ‘Enfin!’ said Jean-Luc, ‘Voici Jérôme Rémont …’

  Jérôme clambered over and covered the artists in kisses. He was dog-bone skinny, and wore only a vest and some pale yellow trousers. He reminded me of an old sepia print I’d seen for sale in St‑Laurent. Now it had sprung into life, and out had popped a startled, sleepy convict.

  Jérôme was a Norman, and had come from Lisieux. I said I’d like to see his work. He smiled and waved a bony arm over the chaos all around.

  ‘Voilà!’ he said, ‘l’art essentiel!’

  From the shambles of his studio a curious tour took shape. At the edge of the trees a gateway appeared, guarded by soldiers. When they saw the shrunken figure of Jérôme lolloping towards them, they stood by and wafted us inside. Immediately everything changed. We were now among avenues with whitewashed kerbstones and long, frilly walls of brickwork like lace. There was a chapel with an entrance for warders and another for convicts, and a parade ground, now covered in drab-green trucks. Pairs of agoutis grazed the lawns, like giant red hamsters (or were they miniature deer?). ‘This is where the prison bread was made,’ said Jérôme, ‘and this is where they killed their cows. We’re always finding bones.’

  Over the hill were the convicts’ sheds. It wasn’t like a prison, more a compulsory village. It had no great wall, and, said Jérôme, there’d only ever been thirty-two warders for 2,000 men. But the convicts here weren’t the ordinary transportés; they were relégués, recidivists banished for life. This hill is all you’ll ever have, they were told, so you might as well make it flourish. Each man was given four hectares of land and made to plant it for France. He wasn’t even allowed to read or write, just to think about the land. As always, nothing came of it. St-Jean was merely one colony deep within another, and when, in 1931, the relégués went on strike, the outside world didn’t even notice.