France’s ‘dry guillotine’ a hell on earth for convicts

THE last surviving French ex-prisoners left Devil’s Island penal colony 65 years ago.

The jungle reclaims the ruins of the former penal colony on Devil’s Island in French Guiana.

WHEN Salvation Army officer Charles Pean exposed the horrors of the penal colony on French Guiana in 1928, 1200 men were shipped to the tropical hellhole every year.

Then known as the “dry guillotine”, Pean noted “men died like flies”, so despite new arrivals, the penal population was dropping by 400 convicts per year.

Those prisoners who survived to serve their prison term, sometimes under even harsher conditions on three islands collectively known as Devil’s Island, were then sentenced to “doubleage” and required to remain in Guiana to work for a period equivalent to their original sentence. Prisoners sentenced to more than eight years were kept in Guiana for life.

After Pean’s lengthy campaign exposed the inhumanity of Guiana and Devil’s Island, France was shamed into closing the penal colony in 1946. The French Government then handed responsibility for repatriating ex-convicts living in squalid poverty in Guiana to the Salvation Army, who delivered the final ex-prisoner to France 65 years ago, on August 22, 1953. Coincidentally, the most recent celluloid account of Devil’s Island will be released in the US this Friday. The Papillon remake stars Charlie Hunnam as ex-prisoner and author Henri Charriere, a role played by Steve McQueen in 1973.

Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman in the 1973 film, Papillon.

A view of Devil’s Island, a former penal colony and one of three islands that make up the Salvation’s Islands off the coast of French Guiana.

An old hospital building on Devil’s Island, a former penal colony off the coast of French Guiana. Picture: iStock

Both films are based on Charriere’s semibiographical novel Papillon, published in 1969. Charriere wrote that he was convicted in October 1931 for the murder of pimp Roland Le Petit. He denied the charge, but was sentenced to life in prison and 10 years of hard labour. Briefly held at Beaulieu in Caen, France, he was transported in 1933 to the St-Laurent-du-Maroni prison on the Maroni River, in the penal settlement on mainland French Guiana. He was one of about 70,000 prisoners sent to Guiana after the government of Emperor Napoleon III established the prison in 1852 to cope with a dramatic increase in convicted criminals.

France had claimed Guiana in 1604, but in 1763 about 75 per cent of 12,000 colonists sent there died in their first year. Deportation was written into the French Penal Code in 1791, with Guiana nominated for a prison in 1792 and the first political dissidents sent there in 1795.

French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, who was later found to have been unjustly condemned for treason.

An illustration published in Paris newspaper Le Petit Journal in 1895 shows Captain Alfred Dreyfus losing his commission for allegedly selling secrets to the Germans.

France abolished slavery in 1848, creating a labour shortage in French Guiana, which France hoped to help fill with convict labour. Then, for 20 years from 1867, convicts from mainland France were sent to New Caledonia, with Guiana reserved for convicts from French colonies, such as Algeria and Indo-China. When Napoleon called for volunteer prisoners from French hulks to transfer to French Guiana, 3000 convicts applied. The main prison was at Cayenne, the national capital, with a convict leper colony on one of three Iles du Salut, or Salvation Islands, about 10km off the coast of Guiana.

Royal held one of two guillotines on the islands and underground cells for incorrigibles sentenced to solitary confinement, where poet Paul Roussenq spent 10 years in a solitary cell. Jewel thief Rene Belbenoit, who escaped to the US in 1935, wrote in his memoir Dry Guillotine that, “In that one spot, more murders have been done than in any place on earth of such restricted space.’’ Aside from the guillotine or being shot by guards, prisoners commonly also murdered each other.

St Joseph island had cells for prisoners who became insane, remembered for nightly screams that sounded like howling monkeys.

Alfred Dreyfus’s stone hut on Devil’s Island.

Early French settlers had named one island Ile du Diable, or Devil’s Island, because of turbulent, shark-invested waters surrounding it, a deathtrap for small vessels. Selected as a prison for traitors and political dissidents, who included French army officer Alfred Dreyfus, later found to have been unjustly condemned for treason, it only ever housed about 12 inmates. They could move about freely, imprisoned by impassable channels. Dreyfus arrived on April 13, 1895, and was released on June 5, 1899, after writing a journal and more than 1000 letters protesting his innocence. In World War I, Devil’s Island imprisoned spies and deserters, mainly from French colonies.

Most inmates at the mainland prison were sent to work camps from 6am to 6pm, along a swampy, 200km coastal strip between Cayenne and the Maroni River. Charriere, nicknamed “Papillon”, was imprisoned at French Guiana in 1933 and escaped in 1941, with help from another convict, counterfeiter Louis Dega. The truth of Charriere’s account of his time in Guiana, including nine escape attempts and two years in solitary confinement, was later disputed.

France abolished transportation of prisoners to penal colonies in June 1938, but the Guiana prison did not close until 1946, when liberated prisoners were left impoverished in Cayenne.