FRANCE: Gone to Hell

For the first time in a century, there were no prisoners last week in Cayenne Penal Colony, the equatorial prison long known as “Devil’s Island.” The last 58 beaten, broken convicts were transferred from the South American swamps to a Paris jail, and with that France brought to an end a prison more infamous than any crime it had ever punished. From the day it was founded in 1854, some 70,000 Frenchmen were sent out to its noisome stockades in expiation of crimes ranging from robbery to murder and high treason. Hardly more than 2,000 ever returned.

Reserved for political prisoners, the little island which gave the whole colony its name was actually only a small part of the sprawling penal community—two other rocky islands and two mainland settlements along the banks of French Guiana’s Maroni River. But the name sticks: only the Devil himself could have designed such hellish discomfort for his prisoners as those that abounded in the steaming jungles of Guiana, or hired jailers as efficient as the shark-infested seas and fever-ridden swamps that stood guard on all sides of the Cayenne colony. The world got its first full whiff of Devil’s Island iniquity in the case of Captive Alfred Dreyfus, who spent four years there before his defender, Emile Zola, wrote J’accuse, and brought him back to freedom.

Freedom to Starve. Most were not so lucky. French law provided that anyone serving under eight years had to stay in Guiana as a libéré, or freed prisoner, for another period equal at least to that of his sentence; anyone sentenced for more than eight years had to remain in the colony for life. About all that differentiated the libérés from the prisoners was the fact that the freed men had to scratch and beg for their living, while the prisoners at least got fed. Money or influence might buy a man special privileges, but there was no honest way to earn them. One of the most ironically successful prisoners in the colony was a onetime mutinous soldier who managed to buy himself the job of prison executioner, only to grow absentminded, kill another convict in a tiff and end up on his own guillotine —after being good enough to set the blade himself.

Other prisoners spent their days, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., working on Guiana’s roads, forests and plantations, their nights locked in fetid barracks. For those who rebelled, there were solitary cells on St. Joseph Island, cement pits whose only opening was an iron grille. Few inmates long survived St. Joseph. One who did was the locally famed Paul Roussenq, an ex-soldier serving 20 years for attempted arson. Paul’s reputation as the ace of all incorrigibles earned him a more or less permanent home on St. Joseph. He wrote frequent obscene letters to the prison governor, went out of his way to plague the warden, tried to give himself TB, practiced acrobatics on the grate of his solitary cell, and indulged in many other pranks. For each offense he got 30 extra days in solitary until at last he had piled up more than ten years in penalties. The authorities gave up, took him to the mainland, where he escaped. Where the jailers had failed, the jungle apparently succeeded. Paul was never heard of again.

No Deterrent. Ever since 1925, when a reporter visited Guiana and wrote a blistering exposé of the prison colony for his paper, Le Petit Parisien, enlightened Frenchmen have been clucking over the shameful institution they call “the dry guillotine,” but little was done about it. It took more than ten years before the French government finally admitted that Cayenne “does not appear to have any deterrent effect upon the criminals” and was “not good for the prestige of France in [the American] continent.” In 1938 the government announced its intention to let the penal colony “disappear by extinction.” Red tape, lassitude and the demands of World War II slowed down the process, but last February the government decided to bring home the last convicts and libérés. Last week Théodore Roussel, a freed man who had spent more than 50 of his 76 years in French Guiana for a long-forgotten robbery, gazed blankly at the soft landscape of his native land. “I can’t blame anyone but myself,” he said of his wasted life. “I was headstrong.”