by Luc Sante
Execution. Drawing by Jacques Wely, 1900
“The police charge.” Illustration by Félix Vallotton, 1893
He robbed factory payrolls, robbed an armory, robbed the Deauville Casino, undertook various kidnappings for ransom. He claimed in his memoirs to have killed thirty-nine people. He appeared indestructible and uncontainable. He evaded several sweeping manhunts and escaped from prison three times, including from maximum security—although he failed in two attempts to break into prisons to free inmates—and fled the courthouse during one of his own trials, taking the judge as hostage. In the course of another trial, in 1977, he loosened his necktie, removed a clutch of handcuff keys from the knot, and flung them at the judge as evidence of the pervasive corruption of the system. In 1979 he kidnapped a tabloid reporter, took him into the woods, stripped him, and shot him in the cheek and the arm “to keep him from talking … and writing bullshit,” and in the leg “for pleasure.” The reporter subsequently found an informant who gave up the location of Mesrine’s hideout, in the Eighteenth Arrondissement.
“Mesrine Gunned Down,” Qui? Police, 1979
On November 2, 1979, Mesrine’s car was stopped at Porte de Clignancourt, behind a truck whose bed was covered with a tarp. Suddenly the tarp lifted, revealing a line of gunmen from the anti-gang squad. Twenty-one shots were fired at Mesrine’s car; eighteen bullets were found in his corpse. Another took out one of his female companion’s eyes. Witnesses were unanimous: there was no warning issued before the firing started. Mesrine’s memoirs, The Death Wish, written in prison, are terse and novelistic, clearly influenced by the Série Noire style. They mostly avoid self-pity and stick to what seem to be forthright admissions: “I have chosen revolt, and the rebuffs of society mean nothing to me. I have violated its laws with pleasure and have lived outside them. I have accorded myself the right to take … I am an outlaw. Society has lost all power over me and has made me impervious to punitive sanctions.” In France he is a folk hero the way Jesse James or Pretty Boy Floyd were in their day in America; possibly no figure is cited more often in French hip-hop and hardcore. He is an image of resistance to power at a time when active political resistance has fallen to an unprecedented low. The moral of his book—that criminals are made by the penal system—resonates profoundly among France’s youth.
La Santé, from the maximum-security block of which Mesrine made his last break, is the only prison remaining within Paris, which now depends primarily on a network of penal institutions in the suburbs. The city has had a great many prisons and houses of detention over the centuries, the most widely famous the Bastille, built in the fourteenth century as a fortress and turned into a prison by Cardinal Richelieu three centuries later. It had eight towers, walls six feet thick, a dry moat with a drawbridge, but its maximum capacity was a mere forty-five. Voltaire was interred there twice in his youth; the Man in the Iron Mask (it was velvet, actually) died there in 1703; the Marquis de Sade spent five and a half years. The crowd seized the prison on July 14, 1789, but it was a private contractor who began to demolish it the following day, turning some of its stones into miniature replicas of the edifice, which were sold to collectors. Far older than the Bastille was the Grand Châtelet, which originated as a wooden fort in the ninth century and was turned into a prison beginning in 1190. It richly deserved its reputation as the most sinister building in Paris, possessing all the horrendous features that lore later ascribed to the Bastille: secret lockups, oubliettes, and a place in the cellars called “the ditch,” into which inmates were lowered by pulley. The ditch was a sort of inverted cone with a low ceiling, making it impossible to stand or lie down, but then, the floor was six inches deep in mud and shit. The average life expectancy there was two weeks; prisoners might be eaten by rats, or drowned when the waters of the Seine rose. While the Bastille’s inmates were freed by the revolutionary crowd, the Châtelet’s last 214 prisoners were massacred by it instead, in 1792.
The Santé prison. Photograph by Charles Marville, circa 1867
The revolutionary crowd attacks the Bastille, 1789, as imagined in the 1840s
The Maison de la Force, built as an hôtel particulier, became a prison in the 1780s. Its men’s wing was intended for debtors; its women’s side was where fathers could consign daughters, and husbands their wives. In 1790 the reform-minded duke of La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, who observed rampant scabies, ringworm, and scrofula there, wrote, “It would be less evil to let the human race die out than to preserve it with such lack of consideration.” In the nineteenth century, when it was expanded and became a general prison, it derived considerable notoriety from its use by novelists, such as Eugène Sue in his Mysteries of Paris, and Balzac, who had Lucien de Rubempré hang himself in his cell there.* The Maison de la Force was demolished in 1845. Mazas, which replaced it, was constructed as a model prison, the biggest in France, with a panoptic design of six three-story buildings arrayed around a central tower from which all the wedge-shaped cells could be seen. Rimbaud was briefly locked up there, as were Victor Hugo, Félix Fénéon, and the future prime minister Georges Clemenceau. It was razed in 1900, to spare visitors to that year’s Universal Exposition from having to see it when they exited the Gare de Lyon, across the street. Sainte-Pélagie, built in the seventeenth century as a home for former prostitutes and made into a prison a century later, was by turns a confinement for royalists, highborn sexual offenders, debtors, and political prisoners. Sade, Vidocq, Proudhon, Nerval, Béranger, Daumier, Courbet, Jules Vallès, Aristide Bruant, Communards, and anarchists all spent time there. It was torn down in 1899.
The Maison de la Force, early nineteenth century
Mazas prison in 1871
Most ordinary arrestees in the nineteenth century were taken to local holding tanks familiarly called violons. If they were not released after questioning they were temporarily moved to the Dépôt, in the police prefecture, which was equipped with eighty-three cells for men and seventy-six for women; the cells were shared, and were reserved for inmates who needed to be isolated from the general population. All others were stuffed into two common rooms, the salle des habits noirs, for those “conventionally attired,” and the salle des blouses, for the proles; there was also a common room for children. For a good part of the century, female detainees were taken to the Salpêtrière, which was also an insane asylum, and for a time some were taken to the former convent of the Madelonnettes, which in addition took up from La Force the function of lodging women committed by their families. Prostitutes were consigned to Saint-Lazare, formerly a leprosarium, the oldest part of which dated back to the twelfth century; it became a prison during the revolution. For most of its term, Saint-Lazare was a hospital prison; prostitutes reported there for their required annual checkups, and those who turned out to be carrying or afflicted by sexually transmitted diseases were held as long as they displayed symptoms. Its second wing lodged prostitutes who were being held for crimes, and later in the century it expanded to take in a general population of female prisoners; Louise Michel and Mata Hari were both inmates. There was also a section reserved for young girls removed by reformers from families of ill repute; somehow it was believed that sequestration would preserve their moral fiber. Saint-Lazare was closed in 1927.
“Entry and exit of the royal prison.” Illustration by Honoré Daumier, from Le Charivari, 1834
The exercise yard at the Salpêtrière asylum, circa 1900
The two prisons of La Roquette were built in the 1830s. The Grande Roquette was the Dépôt des Condamnés—its inmates were either on death row and destined to be guillotined on the street outside or else awaiting shipment to one of the penal colonies. After numerous protests over its conditions, it was closed in 1899. The Petite Roquette was a juvenile detention center, for boys ages fourteen to twenty, built on a semipanoptic model, its inmates spending their days in a “chapel school” where they were isolated in booths open at the front and top. Alfred Delvau described the pair as “one the antechamber of the other, the p
rologue facing the epilogue, the exposition in view of the dénouement, the tree nursery on the step of the forest.” Then, from 1935 until it closed in 1974, the Petite Roquette was the city’s last prison for women.
La Santé, built in the 1860s and doubled in size following the closure of the Grande Roquette, was the signal prison of the twentieth century. Its high, featureless walls impart a Gothic gloom to its neighborhood in the Fourteenth. It looks impregnable, and yet quite a number of escapes have been made; you can see a convincing one in Jacques Becker’s Le trou (1960), based on the admirably claustrophobic novel by José Giovanni. Jean Genet, who was first incarcerated at age fifteen in the Petite Roquette, spent time at La Santé in addition to a number of penal institutions outside the city. Other alumni include Guillaume Apollinaire, when he was accused of stealing the Mona Lisa, as well as Maurice Papon, Manuel Noriega, and Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal—it remains the number one celebrity lockup in France. For a time in the late twentieth century its four blocks were divided up ethnically: one for Western Europeans, one for North Africans, one for sub-Saharan Africans, and one for the rest of the world.
For several centuries, those judged guilty of infractions deemed too severe for ordinary prison time but not quite deserving of the death penalty were sent to the bagne, which has come to mean “penal colony.” As its etymology would suggest—from the Latin balneum—its origins were nautical, and indeed the bagnes were at first literally galleys, exclusively so until the mid-eighteenth century; the practice survived until steamships began to dominate in the mid-nineteenth. In the intervening century, dry-land bagnes were built near French ports, the most important at Toulon, Brest, and Rochefort. For reasons that included security and reduction of costs, they began to be moved offshore and overseas around 1840.* The island of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, in the Bay of Biscay, was the transshipment point for the bagnes in Indochina, Madagascar, French Guyana, and New Caledonia. The Cayenne complex in French Guyana achieved worldwide notoriety as a result of the cases of Alfred Dreyfus and much later Papillon (Henri Charrière), both of whom were confined to Devil’s Island, which in turn was just one part of the bagne of the Îles du Salut; the entire complex comprised four bagnes and twenty-four inland camps. The New Caledonia bagnes, in particular the immense one at Nouméa, became associated with the Communards who were sentenced there in 1871, some remaining for many decades afterward. (Francis Carco, whose father was an administrator, was born there in 1886.) But as brutal as these civil bagnes were—and there is a vast literature of torture and escape, concerning Cayenne in particular—they pale compared with the military bagnes.
“Île de Ré: convicts leaving for Guyana,” circa 1910
Both of the military bagnes were in North Africa; confusingly, one of them, Tataouine, was a single installation in Tunisia, while the other, Biribi, was a large complex of far-flung camps: five in Algeria, three in Tunisia, and one in Morocco. Biribi, which achieved notoriety as a result of Georges Darien’s 1890 novel of that name, Aristide Bruant’s song “À Biribi,” a special issue of L’ Assiette au Beurre in 1905, and many other things, took its name, in common parlance if not quite official, from a version of the shell game. The great reporter Albert Londres called Biribi “hell on earth”; his book on the subject was titled Dante Never Saw Anything (1924). Biribi began at an uncertain point before 1845 and was not shut down until the early 1970s, despite its being known to one and all as a place of torture, where the means of discipline included chaining prisoners to a horizontal bar and leaving them open to the elements for an indefinite period (la barre), binding hands and feet together behind the prisoner’s back and then leaving him exposed (la crapaudine), and putting the bound prisoner into a small tent with his head out and a pan of water just out of reach (le baillon). The military bagnes were intended for military discipline, comparable to, for example, the “brig” in the U.S. Navy. A disproportionate number of the inmates in Biribi, however, came from the Bats d’Af, formally the Bataillons d’Infanterie Légère d’Afrique. Originally a colonial military division of no special distinction, the Bats d’Af began at some indefinite point in the late nineteenth century to be employed as a punitive measure for young urban miscreants, and that was cemented by a law of 1905 specifying the sorts of convicts to be sent there, which included pimps, con artists, and sexual offenders. Naturally, the corps became an extension of the French underworld; the function of the caïd, for example, originated there and was exported to Paris. In their day, the Bats d’Af were also notorious for the open and unabashed pursuit of homosexual practices among their ranks, engaged in by at least two-thirds of conscripts, by a conservative estimate. The battalions were not finally dissolved until 1972.
Overseeing all incarcerations were the police, formally established in 1667, organized under a prefect in 1800, and given uniforms in 1829, when cops in Paris began to be called sergents de ville. There were 85 of them that year, 480 in 1849; reorganized under Napoléon III and now called gardiens de la paix, they numbered 7,756 right after the Commune, and more than 8,000 in 1892, following a further reorganization in the wake of anarchist bomb scares. There were 17,000 in 1938, and there are about 15,000 today. Traditionally they were attired in pelerines, short hooded capes, and for a century these were topped with the cylindrical képi, which gave way to caps in 1985.* The police were hated by the poor, even the most law-abiding; they were not viewed as protectors or justice seekers but as agents of power, at best a nuisance, at worst a menace. In a small item in L’Endehors in 1893, Fénéon reported seeing in a music hall in the Twentieth Arrondissement the following notice: BY ORDER OF THE PREFECT: SONGS CONTAINING THE TERMS “POLICE OFFICER” OR “CONSTABLE,” OR REFERENCES TO ANY OTHER KEEPER OF THE PEACE, ARE STRICTLY FORBIDDEN; he suggested that there were many synonyms to choose from. And indeed the police were collectively known as la poulaille (poultry), la renifle (the snort), l’arnaque (the scam), and many other terms not easily translatable, and individual cops were mannequins, pedestrians, penguins, snails, slugs, flics, and for a very long time vaches (cows), which began as a general term of abuse but by the late nineteenth century had come to be applied to all forces of order, most usually the police. Steinlen’s frontispiece drawing for the second volume of Aristide Bruant’s Dans la rue (1895) shows a young couple, the girl looking on shyly while the boy carves something in a wall. The last page of the book shows a couple of cops in pelerines inspecting the result, not a heart pierced by an arrow, but MORT AUX VACHES.
Institute of Correctional Education for Children, called “Petite Roquette,” circa 1910
“Cayenne: prisoners from Madagascar breaking rocks,” circa 1910
Biribi, discipline militaire, by Georges Darien. Cover illustration by Théophile Steinlen, 1890
A fascination with crime, its players, its circumstances, its props and effluvia, was something that cut across class lines. Although this prurient interest dated back to antiquity, it was not really exploited by the press until a paper called Faits Divers appeared in 1862, soon followed by first the Petit Journal (1863–1944) and then the Petit Parisien (1876–1944), which initiated and cultivated the enduring national fascination with the fait-divers. There is no real equivalent in English for this term, which can be rendered literally as “sundry fact.” It is usually a brief news item, comparable in size to the filler item but not simply used to fill up column space; frequently faits-divers are stacked together under a rubric. More generally they are the sort of thing that tabloids have traditionally been devoted to, crimes and local disasters and instances of grotesque misbehavior; the term can encompass continuing stories, with the proviso that they be complete unto themselves, with few if any reverberations in the wider world. As Roland Barthes put it, “Take a murder: if it’s political, it’s news; if it isn’t, it’s a fait-divers.” The term effectively defines a broad category in French thought, only partly intersecting with the English anecdote. The germ of Madame Bovary is a fait-divers, for example, although
that cannot be said of Les misérables, for all that it contains numerous faits-divers in its voluminous folds. Some of Balzac’s shorter works are decorated faits-divers, while Georges Simenon’s romans durs, his non-Maigret novels, are pure faits-divers, perhaps more than any other body of literary work, if you except Fénéon’s daily factual contributions to a fait-divers column in Le Matin for six months in 1906. The essence of the fait-divers is that it involves a voyeuristic fascination with other people’s miseries, a taste for the lurid and the scabrous—ideally stories of passion and violence with implied scenery, although mere morbidity and squalor will do in a pinch—and of course the ability to consume such things in the safety of one’s armchair.*
Police rampage. Illustration by Félix Vallotton, 1893
“Mort aux vaches.” End plate by Théophile Steinlen for Aristide Bruant’s Dans la rue, vol. 2, 1889
Le Petit Journal made its bones in 1870 with its comprehensive coverage of the Troppmann case—a young German immigrant murdered eight members of the Kinck family in Pantin and was caught carrying their papers and jewelry, about to board a steamer to America—which virtually defined the fait-divers. It got a further jump on the competition when it began to feature an illustrated supplement in 1884, and then, as of 1890, illustrated covers in full color. Parisians were able to feast their eyes every week on tabloid-size artists’ renditions of train wrecks, apache brawls, crimes of passion, anarchist bombings, and dramas in the colonies. Although L’Oeil de la Police, a more specialized publication employing similar cover art, attempted to refine the market in 1908, its impact was ephemeral. It was not until twenty years later that a weekly entirely devoted to crime properly galvanized the nation.