THE PRISONS OF PARIS.
La Santé--La Roquette--The Conciergerie--The
Mazas--Sainte-Pélagie--Saint-Lazare--Prison Regulations.
The Luxemburg, though only from time to time (and usually at intervals
of several years) transformed into a High Court of Justice, has a prison
permanently attached to it. The apartments reserved for prisoners of
state have, however, nothing in common with the ordinary prisons of
Paris. These abound on both sides of the Seine. Not far from the end of
the Luxemburg Gardens, and close to the Boulevard Saint-Jacques, is the
prison of La Santé--built in 1865 at a cost of six millions of francs,
for the reception of twelve thousand prisoners: about a ninth part of
the total population of the Paris prisons. But before leaving the
Boulevard Saint-Jacques and the Place Saint-Jacques, to which the Rue du
Faubourg Saint-Jacques directly leads, a word must be said about the
open space formerly closed by the ancient Barrière Saint-Jacques. During
twenty years, from 1832 to 1851, the Place Saint-Jacques was the scene
of public executions. Here, while the scaffold was being erected, the
innumerable taverns of the barrier were crowded with revellers, who,
after supping all night, remained at the windows of the rooms they had
hired at great cost, in order early the next morning to see the
guillotine at work. Similar scenes took place in our own capital when
murderers were publicly hanged outside Newgate; scenes which have been
described in admirable prose and in perfect verse by Thackeray and by
Ingoldsby.
The prisons of Paris have played an important part in history, though
the most historical of them no longer exist. With the exception of
Saint-Lazare and the Conciergerie, which still preserve some vestiges of
the past, the prisons that figure so largely in the annals of France
have vanished.
Paris has been described by a well-known French writer as a “city of
destruction.” Edifices fraught with the memories of ages fall, he
complains, under the hand of the municipal destroyer like castles built
of cards. If there is a house which dates back even to the seventeenth
century it has to be looked for at the end of some court or alley, which
has escaped the pickaxe and hammer by sheer insignificance. Even as
regards churches, there are few which are more than three or four
generations old. When we have counted Notre Dame, the two churches of
Saint-Germain, the Sainte-Chapelle, and one or two temples of lesser
importance, we have to leap to Saint-Eustache and Saint-Sulpice, and
thence take a big bound to the Madeleine. This eternal demolition by
architects who wish to outdo their predecessors is a matter of keen
lament to archæologists and to writers like M. Jules Simon, who declares
that the only pickaxe he can forgive is the one that overthrew the
Bastille, and that he forgives it because it, at the same time,
“overthrew everything else.”
Of all the historical prisons of Paris one only can be said to exist
to-day--the Conciergerie. It preserves an air of the past by virtue of a
few antiquities which still belong to it: such as the two big towers on
the quay, the large walls inside, the large table in the courtyard, at
which Saint Louis is reported to have fed the poor, the room in which
Damiens was confined, and the dungeon of Marie Antoinette.
In 1830 Paris could boast--or perhaps one should say blush for--twenty
civil prisons. Not a few of these consisted of old convents or other
buildings converted into state gaols; and it may well be imagined that
such places were neither salubrious nor secure. The prisoners were not
even divided into categories. In the present day eight or nine prisons
suffice for a much larger number of convicts, and admit of a regular
classification.
First, there is a lock-up, or _maison de dépôt_, at the prefecture of
police. Then there are three “preventive” prisons--Mazas and La Santé
for men and the Conciergerie for both sexes. One portion of Saint-Lazare
is also set apart for the accommodation of the fair sex. Sainte-Pélagie
and Saint-Lazare--the first for men and the second for women--are houses
of correction for prisoners sentenced to one year or less. It is at
Sainte-Pélagie that political prisoners are for the most part confined.
In La Roquette are lodged prisoners under sentence of death and
offenders condemned to more than one year. Clichy, once the debtors’
prison, has already in these pages been amply described.
Nor should we omit to mention the military prison of the Rue du
Cherche-Midi; the prison of the National Guard; the dépôt of Saint-Denis
where mendicants are locked up; and La Petite Roquette, where, until
1865, were imprisoned, and subjected to the rigorous régime of cell
confinement, children and youths guilty for the most part, as M. Jules
Simon well expresses it, of having had unnatural parents.
[Illustration: PRISON OF LA SANTÉ.]
[Illustration: INSIDE THE WALLS, LA SANTÉ.]
In taking a leisurely survey of the principal Paris prisons, we may
begin with La Roquette as the most formidable in character. Situated in
the street and place of the same name, it was built towards 1837, and on
such a perfect plan that there has hitherto been no example of any
prisoner’s escape or even attempted escape from it. This gaol,
therefore, is to criminals one of the most redoubtable. The gloomy
impressions, however, which it may well produce on a stranger are
somewhat relieved by the fact that the courtyard by which it is
approached is adorned with a fountain, and that the prison boasts a well
composed library of some two thousand volumes; nor, since crime is so
often the outcome of ignorance, could a wiser means of recreation for
the convicts be devised. The librarian is usually a convict who has
received a certain education, and who has earned this post of confidence
by repentance and good behaviour. It has been found, indeed, that the
inmates prefer reading to any other diversion, and statistics of the
books lent out show that each prisoner gets through nearly one volume a
week. The library is divided into various sections; and the books most
eagerly read are said to be works of science.
[Illustration: THE COMMON QUARTER, LA SANTÉ--“THE PARLOUR.”]
The régime imposed at La Roquette is uniform, and applies without
distinction to all classes of offenders. Everyone within the walls rises
at 5.0 a.m., does ten hours’ work relieved by intervals for food and
recreation, and goes to bed at half-past seven, passing the night in a
strongly bolted cell, of which the sole furniture is an iron bedstead.
An exception, however, as regards sleeping, is made in the case of
prisoners liable to epileptic fits, or who have attempted to commit
suicide. These sleep in special dormitories under the careful inspection
of warders. One room, moreover, is set apart for fever patients. Another
is reserved for those prisoners who have softened the rigour of their
confinement by particularly good behaviour or--what some will think less
admirable--by informing against their accomplices. It frequently happens
that the accomplices so betrayed find their way to the same gaol, and if
the informers were not isolated deeds of vengeance might sometimes be
committed. The administration of La Roquette consists of a governor, a
chaplain, a physician, two clerks (senior and junior), a brigadier, an
under-brigadier, fourteen warders, a dispenser, a laundress, and a
sutler. Nearly two dozen prisoners, moreover, are employed about the
establishment as auxiliaries.
At certain periods gangs of convicts are transferred from La Roquette to
provincial state prisons or houses of correction. Before their
departure, however, they are most rigorously searched lest they should
have upon them any sort of instrument which might assist them to escape
from their future residence. One tool in particular, the invention of
inveterate criminals, is always an object of apprehension with the
authorities on such occasions. This consists of a kind of diminutive
fret-saw, which by a miracle of patience can be made out of scraps of
metal, and with which thick iron bars can sometimes be cut through. It
was a saw of this family that Ainsworth’s prison-hero employed to sever
the bar of his Newgate cell.
Since 1851 the Paris executioner has been accustomed to perform his grim
functions in front of La Roquette. A number of massive stones which,
forming a square, are let into the pavement outside, serve as basis for
the temporary erection of the guillotine whenever a head is to fall. The
surface of these stones is level with that of the pavement, and many a
pedestrian walks over them without dreaming of their sinister utility.
The guillotine is usually put up during the night; but despite the early
hour at which, thanks to this precaution, executions take place, the
spectacle of decapitation always draws a crowd of curious persons,
consisting, it is sad to say, largely of women and youths, who will
brave all the rigours of a winter’s night in order to witness from the
front rank the death of some wretch, notorious or obscure. It was on the
Place de la Roquette that Verger (assassin of the Archbishop of Paris),
Orsini (the would-be destroyer of Napoleon III.), La Pommerais (the
poisoning doctor), and many other criminal celebrities, were executed.
“Perhaps,” says a fanciful French writer, “during the fatal night which
preceded their last hour they heard the nailing-down of the guillotine
planks; for La Roquette is the gaol where those under death-sentence are
lodged in a special cell.” This cell is cold and gloomy: a bed and a
table constitute its furniture. It is here that the condemned man gets
his last snatch of sleep, if indeed he can sleep at all; it is hence
that, after a last “toilette,” he steps forth to make his exit by that
prison doorway which to him is the threshold of eternity.
* * * * *
The Conciergerie is the gaol of the department of the Seine. It gained a
sinister celebrity during some of the most sanguinary periods of French
history. This sombre prison abounds in recollections of those strifes
and miseries by which royal epochs were too often characterised, and of
that vengeance and blind fury which distinguished the Revolution. Every
political movement, every religious passion, has contributed to the
horrors which mark the annals of this institution.
The Conciergerie is an appendage to the Palais de Justice; and when this
palace, which was originally a fortress, became the residence of the
French kings, it served as prison. It would appear to have been built
about the same time as the palace, though it has undergone sundry
alterations and enlargements during successive ages.
Reconstructed by Saint Louis, the Conciergerie, as its name indicates,
included the residence of the prison-governor. The “concierge” of the
palace was no unimportant personage. He was in a certain way the
governor of the royal mansion, and all royal prisoners were under his
charge. He could administer petty justice in the palace and its
surroundings, and he appointed a bailiff to carry out the law in his
name. His privileges were extensive enough. It was he whom merchants had
to pay for the right of exposing their wares for sale at the Palais
Royal. In 1348 the concierge took the official title of bailiff. More
than one person of high distinction has held this office: Philippe de
Savoisi, friend of Charles VI., for instance, and Juvenal des Ursins,
the historiographer of that monarch’s reign. Louis XI.’s famous
physician, Jacques Coictier, was the first who united the functions of
bailiff with those of concierge.
The concierge-bailiff of the Palais had on many points a discretionary
power over the prisoners of the Conciergerie. He himself taxed the food
he supplied to them, and fixed the rate of hire for the furniture they
used; and more than one prisoner, released by order of justice, found
himself retained at the Conciergerie until he could pay his bill for
board and lodging. The post of concierge-bailiff lasted until the
Revolution. The cases which came beneath the jurisdiction of this
functionary were tried in a large hall of the palace. These were cases
of misdoing which had occurred within the palace walls.
One of the most ghastly scenes ever enacted within the walls of the
Conciergerie was that in which, during the quarrels between the
Armagnacs and the Bourguignons, those ruffian supporters of the latter
party, known as the “cabochiens,” invaded the gaol and killed the crowd
of prisoners within it, irrespective of age or sex. The court of the
palace was inundated with blood and strewn with corpses. The Count
d’Armagnac, Constable of France, six bishops, and numerous members of
the Paris Parliament expired under the blades of the assassins.
The dungeons of the Conciergerie, built at the level of the Seine, were
dark and unhealthy: the light of day could never penetrate to them.
During the Middle Ages several pestilences, caused by the filthy
condition of the prisoners combined with insufficiency of food, broke
out at the Conciergerie and awakened the attention of the authorities.
On the 31st June, 1543, beds were for the first time placed in the
apartment known as the infirmary; and it was about this period that the
gaolers were instructed not to ill-treat the wretches beneath their
charge. They were to treat them “gently and humanely, to provide them
with water and straw, to procure them the services of priests, etc.” In
spite of these reforms, the Conciergerie long remained the most
unhealthy prison in Paris.
In 1776, during the fire at the Palais de Justice, a great part of the
Conciergerie fell a prey to the flames; nor was the mischief repaired
until some years afterwards. The fire had already reached one of the
towers occupied by the prisoners, when the officials were for the first
time warned of their danger by their cries for help.
During the revolutionary period the number of prisoners shut up in the
Conciergerie sometimes rose to 1,200. At the time of the September
massacre this prison was the scene of a horrible slaughter. According to
documents of indisputable exactness, close on three hundred persons
fell, at the Conciergerie, beneath the weapons of the agents of popular
vengeance. The “Septembrisseurs,” however, spared all the women, with
one exception. A poor wretch, known as the “pretty flower-girl” of the
Palais Royal, had, in a moment of furious jealousy, mutilated a French
guard, her lover; and she was now put to death with unheard-of cruelty.
According to Pelletier’s account she was attached to a stake, naked, her
feet nailed to the ground, her breasts were cut off with blows from a
sabre, and various other atrocious tortures inflicted upon her before
she expired.
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF LA SANTÉ.]
Whilst the Revolutionary tribunal was accomplishing its bloody work, the
Conciergerie served, so to say, as the antechamber to the scaffold. Most
of the proscribed were shut up in this prison, whence they issued only
to mount the fatal cart which was to convey them to their slaughter. At
this period, the chambers being too small, prisoners were huddled
together, to the number of fifty, in a space of twenty feet square,
without distinction of social position, age, or sex. Big dogs, let loose
at night in the courtyards, completed the system of surveillance; these
were the most dreaded gaolers of all. At a time when famine threatened
the capital, the prisoners’ rations were reduced. Soon a regulation was
made that all meals should be taken in common, at a cost of two francs a
head, and that the rich and aristocratic prisoners should pay for the
rest. “Drolly enough,” says Mercier, “the estimation in which these
gentlemen were held depended on the number of ragged wretches they fed,
just as it formerly did in the world on the number of their horses,
their mistresses, their dogs, and their lackeys.” Despite the horror of
their situation, the prisoners of the Conciergerie preserved the
frivolous and licentious habits of the epicurean society of the
eighteenth century. They threw away the last hours of their lives on
games of all kinds, or on amorous intrigues; they laughed at
everything--even the guillotine. Royalists, aristocrats, and popular
leaders were carried to the Conciergerie by the flux or reflux of the
Revolution, and they lived together in a fatal state of indifference,
disdaining to dispute their head with the executioner. Few took the
trouble even to curse their judges; many died singing a song. It was in
the midst of this general intrepidity that Beauharnais, Danton, Camille
Desmoulins, Queen Marie Antoinette, Madame Elizabeth, her sister, and a
host of other less distinguished victims, passed from the Conciergerie
to the scaffold. In this same prison, at a later date, Robespierre and
his partisans awaited the hour of their execution. Under the Restoration
the chamber in which Marie Antoinette was confined was turned into a
chapel; the pavement alone remaining as it was in 1794. Since the Reign
of Terror the Conciergerie has received many prisoners who have become
historical, with Louvel among them, the assassin of the Duke of Berri.
[Illustration: THE GAOLERS’ MESS-ROOM, LA SANTÉ.]
The torture which many of the wretched prisoners underwent was inflicted
for the most part in the famous Bombec Tower, beneath which existed what
were called _oubliettes_, or dungeons in which prisoners were subjected
to diabolical cruelty. These dungeons bristled everywhere with sharp
sword-blades; they were inhabited by rats and loathsome reptiles; and
the wretch who was thrown into them found, amidst other horrors, that
the waters of the Seine crept in upon him as the tide rose. One of the
cells of this tower, into which no light could penetrate, had been
occupied by Ravaillac.
In modern times the Conciergerie has been rendered habitable. The dark
and humid cells constructed at the foot of the towers have been either
filled up or suppressed. Already some years ago it was boasted that,
with one exception, the Conciergerie contained no dungeon into which the
light of day could not steal.
* * * * *
The Mazas prison, situated on the boulevard of the same name, dates from
1850. The official name is “The house of cellular arrest.” The
administration abandoned in 1858 the original designation of Mazas
prison, on the petition of the family of Colonel Mazas, who was killed
at Austerlitz. But custom is more powerful than any administration; and
to the public this gaol is to-day still known solely by the name of
Mazas.
Its construction, commenced in 1845, was not terminated till five years
later. The cost of so vast a prison was naturally enormous. It was
intended in the first instance to replace the prison of La Force, then
situated in the Rue Pavée-aux-Marais and the Rue du Roi-de-Sicile. The
ground on which the first constructions were raised had previously been
occupied by market-gardeners and by a mill, which was demolished. The
works progressed rapidly under the direction of the architects, Gilbert
and Lecointe. Interrupted by the Revolution of 1848, they were resumed
shortly afterwards, and on the 19th of May, 1850, took place the
inauguration--if this word can be employed in so sinister a sense--of
the new prison; the installation, that is to say, of the prisoners. Less
than twelve hours sufficed to transfer eight hundred and forty-one
convicts in cellular vans, to establish them in their new abode, and
inscribe their names, and other particulars concerning them, in the
books of the gaol.
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO LA GRANDE ROQUETTE.]
At this period the grave inconveniences which have by degrees asserted
themselves in France as the result of the cellular system were not yet
clearly recognised. Thus it was that the first poor wretches who, after
their transfer from La Force, found themselves suddenly immured in the
cells of Mazas, were seized with fits of fury and despair which soon
took the proportions of a panic and a riot. The whole building resounded
with incessant cries and shouts: the condemned, isolated from one
another, and exasperated by their solitude, trying to converse by shouts
with their old acquaintances lodged in distant cells. Some requested as
a favour to be taken back to La Force. At length the administration felt
it discreet to order an inquiry into the state of things, and the
Academy of Medicine was consulted. M. de Pietra-Santa, an eminent member
of that body, wrote, in a report which he laid before his colleagues:
“The cellular system employed in prisons plays deadly havoc with the
intellectual faculties. It develops scrofulous diseases, and urges its
victims to suicide.” Statistics were quoted to show what a formidable
proportion of cell-confined prisoners either took or attempted their own
lives. In the end the Academy of Medicine denounced the prison-cell in
uncompromised terms; and, in consequence, the system of isolation ceased
at the Mazas prison to be rigorously enforced. As, however, the edifice
had been constructed on a particular plan which did not permit of its
conversion into an ordinary prison, its original purposes were modified
by the confinement within its walls only of prisoners under short
sentences. “In these circumstances,” says a contemporary French writer,
“solitary confinement, far from being an inconvenience, presents in
general the advantage of not mixing prisoners arrested from very diverse
causes, and the moral character of whose offences widely differs.
Moreover, the individual who may perhaps be acquitted to-morrow has not
to endure a regrettable contact, which is often dangerous.”
The Mazas prison is surrounded by a girdle wall which conceals it from
the public gaze; though the curious can easily defeat this difficulty by
mounting the viaduct of the railway of Vincennes, which traverses the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine. From this elevation a bird’s-eye glance of the
whole of the buildings may be obtained.
The sanitation of this prison leaves little to be desired. The cells are
spacious, wholesome, and well ventilated. Their furniture consists of a
hammock suspended from cramp-irons; of a wooden stool, a water-can, and
one or two other articles the reverse of luxurious. The ventilation is
managed on scientific principles by means of orifices at different
altitudes; and so effectual is it that in an experiment which was once
made, with three men smoking tobacco in them incessantly for three
hours, it was found that the fumes disappeared as fast as they were
produced, and that the atmosphere never once lost its transparency. This
circumstance is a great consolation for the Mazas prisoners, who can
beguile the time with their pipes.
As to the interior régime of the prison, the spacious courts which
separate each gallery of cells are divided into promenades, in which the
prisoners are free to exercise themselves for at least one hour a day. A
part of these promenades is provided with a shelter in view of wet
weather. The prisoners take exercise by turns, and always alone, the
warders being able from certain points of observation to follow their
movements incessantly. An infirmary is attached to the prison, as well
as bath rooms, which are no less commodious than cleanly. Each prisoner
is known at Mazas by the number of his cell, inscribed on a plate hung
above the door, and which is turned over to indicate that the prisoner
is away from his cell taking exercise or receiving instruction. Among
the special punishments inflicted on the more serious offenders are:
exclusion from outdoor exercise, a diet of bread and water, a bare plank
bed, and a dark cell.
The administrative and subordinate staff of the Mazas consists of a
director, four registration clerks, a brigadier, four sub-brigadiers,
sixty-four warders, a laundress, three chaplains, a doctor, a chemist, a
female searcher, two barbers, and four commissioners, not to mention
some three dozen prisoners employed as assistants.
What chiefly strikes a visitor to the place is the regular and
geometrical plan on which the whole prison is constructed. The
arrangements are of the most perfect description, though it was
complained some years since that the method of arranging divine
service--the door of each cell being kept ajar, so that the prisoner can
see the altar and the officiating priest--provided to a large part of
the prisoners little more than a curious spectacle.
* * * * *
The prison of Sainte-Pélagie, founded in 1665, owes its name to a holy
penitent of the fifth century, who was a famous actress at Antioch,
when, after hearing a sermon from the bishop of Heliopolis, she became a
convert to Christianity, received baptism, liberated her slaves, and
made over her property to the bishop that it might be given to the poor.
Then, clothing herself in a rough garment, she made her way secretly to
Jerusalem, and there built herself a cell on the Mount of Olives, where
she led the most austere life. In memory of Sainte Pélagie, Madame
Beauharnais de Miramion, who, according to the memoirs of the eighteenth
century, had for years led a life of pleasure, built an immense house of
refuge for young girls. As the rule of life laid down by the pious
founder (though she herself submitted to it) seemed too strict to the
young women of the establishment, as well as to their families, they
were one by one withdrawn, until at last the mistress of the house found
herself alone. Then Madame de Miramion--determined that someone should
do penance--addressed herself to women and girls of loose life, when
those who were really tired of their wild existence, with others who had
lost all personal charms, accepted the hospitality offered to them at
Sainte-Pélagie. Gradually the number of repentant Magdalens--thanks not
only to goodwill on their part but to the intervention of the
police--became so great that many of them had to be moved to the convent
of Les Filles de la Mère-Dieu.
When in 1789 the Revolution broke out, the gates of Sainte-Pélagie were
thrown open like those of the convents; and the repentant girls, equally
with the nuns, were at liberty to leave their cells. Two years later the
Commune of Paris converted the building into a prison, where men and
women were confined for all sorts of offences, political as well as
criminal. From 1797 until 1834 Sainte-Pélagie was a debtors’ prison, and
it was then changed into a house of correction for juvenile offenders,
vagabonds below the age of sixteen, and children found hopeless by their
parents.
Under the Second Empire, as for a time under the First and during a
portion of the Restoration, Sainte-Pélagie was exclusively a state
prison. Here it was that the first Napoleon--in the words of an
anti-Bonapartist writer--“shut up those citizens who displeased him and
failed to manifest for his policy all the enthusiasm he desired.” To
this despot is due the introduction at Sainte-Pélagie of special
registers, called “registers of persons brought beneath the notice of
the administration”--in other words, beneath the notice of the police.
The Restoration continued this work--the imprisonment, that is to say,
of suspected persons--as practised alike under the Empire, the Republic,
and the ancient Monarchy. At the beginning of Louis XVIII.’s reign no
less than 135 persons were arrested by the king’s private police, simply
as having served under Napoleon in the Imperial Guard.
In the courtyard of Sainte-Pélagie stands a chapel, built under the
Restoration by the Duchess of Berri, which among other curiosities
contains an altar-cloth worked by the Duchess de Praslin, whose tragic
death at the hands of her husband has already been related, and a _Via
Dolorosa_, painted by a prisoner who had been condemned for immoral
pictures. All the Catholic prisoners, with the exception of those
sentenced for political and press offences, are obliged to be present on
Sundays and holidays at mass and at vespers. A platoon of infantry also
assists at these ceremonies.
The prisoners are divided into three categories. The first includes
those who are exempted from work without being obliged to pay for the
privilege; these are the political offenders and persons who have
contravened the laws relating to the press. The second comprises those
who, for a payment averaging from six or seven francs a fortnight,
purchase the right not to labour. To the third belong all the prisoners
who are obliged to work in the shops directed by the speculator who
farms the prison. These last receive but a third part of the wages paid
by the speculator. Of the two other thirds, one goes to the
administration, the other to the prisoner the day he is set at liberty.
A prison-workman gains on the average two francs twenty-five centimes a
month, of which he receives, as his own particular share, five centimes
or one sou per day, which he is allowed to spend in the prison canteen.
In France, as in England, different views are entertained on the subject
of prison-labour. The prisoners must work; and it is both wasteful and
cruel to employ them without advantage to themselves or anyone else--as,
for instance, in drawing water and then throwing it away. If, however,
they are employed, like the occupants of Sainte-Pélagie and other French
prisons, with useful work they are brought into competition with the
honest workman outside. The political prisoners, and the prisoners who
are allowed to liberate themselves from work by small payments, are
permitted to order from the outside, by the intermediary of
commissionaires attached to the prison for that purpose, whatever food
and drink they may require. “Luxuries,” it is true, are not permitted by
the prison regulations, but it rests with the officials to determine
what a “luxury” really means.
Prisoners at this, as at some of the other Paris prisons, are allowed to
send out letters, but copies of them are made and kept in the governor’s
office. By this system not only the prisoner but France and the whole
world has, in some cases, profited. It was through copies being made of
the eloquent and passionate, if not too edifying, epistles addressed by
Mirabeau, during his confinement in the Bastille, to the young woman he
was so desperately in love with that the now famous “Lettres à Sophie”
were preserved.
The ordinary inhabitants of Sainte-Pélagie are, in addition to the
political and newspaper offenders, juvenile thieves, tradesmen whose
scales have not been found sufficiently impartial, with fraudulent
bankrupts and debtors to the state--the only ones who, since the
abolition of imprisonment for debt in civil and commercial matters, are
still liable to confinement.
The official staff of Sainte-Pélagie consists of a governor, a
physician in chief with two assistants, a dispenser, a Roman Catholic
priest, a registrar, a clerk, a brigadier, twelve warders, three
commissionaires, a female searcher, a barber (who recruits his
auxiliaries from among the prisoners), a sutler, and a sempstress. The
prison is guarded by a company of infantry stationed at different posts.
[Illustration: WARDERS’ ROOM AND ADJOINING COURTYARD, LA GRANDE
ROQUETTE.]
A list of the celebrated prisoners who have been confined at
Sainte-Pélagie would be a formidable one. Sainte-Pélagie ceased to be a
convent in 1790, and was transformed to a prison by order of the
Convention. During this period many persons suspected of political
intrigue were lodged in this prison previously to appearing before the
Revolutionary Tribunal. Some distinguished offenders quitted
Sainte-Pélagie for the scaffold: Madame Roland, for instance, the Comte
de Laval Montmorency, and the Marquis de Pons. On the 3rd of August,
1793, in virtue of an edict for the arrest of the actors of the Théâtre
de la Nation (afterwards Théâtre Français), Fleury, Lange, Petit, Suin,
Joly, Devienne, Lachassaigne, Rancourt, and Mézerai were all
incarcerated at Sainte-Pélagie. After the 9th Thermidor it received the
victims of the counter-revolution, but ere long the prison was quite
empty, and no further political prisoners found their way into it until
the Empire, when, although they were by no means few, their numbers
cannot be certainly ascertained, as the prison books were not faithfully
kept. In 1811, at a time when the Emperor of Russia was in Paris,
sixty-eight prisoners were liberated at his request. The Restoration,
from the 15th of April, 1814, to the 29th of January, 1815, incarcerated
135 prisoners, nearly all of them old officers of the Imperial Guard.
When the allies entered Paris for the second time the Russian Emperor,
who the year before had procured the liberation of political prisoners
detained by Bonaparte, made use of Sainte-Pélagie for the imprisonment
of Russian deserters to the number of 192. Among the latter were several
Poles guilty of having fought for their country in the French armies.
These so-called deserters found themselves in the same gaol with the
victims of the royalist reaction. Under Charles X. Sainte-Pélagie
continued to be a state prison, and began to afford accommodation to
journalists or authors who had been indiscreet with their pen. Between
1820 and 1830 many a celebrity lodged there, such as Béranger, Paul
Louis Courier, Eugène de Pradel, Dubois and Barthélemy--to name no
others.
From 1830 to 1838 the constitutional monarchy made a sufficiently free
use of Sainte-Pélagie. Then the Republic came and set the prisoners
loose; though the insurrection of June repeopled Sainte-Pélagie, into
which no less than a hundred offenders were summarily thrown.
On the 17th of December, 1851, the man who nineteen years afterwards was
to finish his career at Sedan imprisoned thirty-four representatives of
the people at Sainte-Pélagie. Nor did Napoleon III. stop here. In the
space of a few days he lodged within the gaol some five hundred citizens
whom he considered dangerous and capable of interfering with his
projects.
It would be impossible within a limited space to adequately trace the
subsequent history of Sainte-Pélagie. Before quitting this gaol,
however, mention may be made of one or two of the most famous escapes
which have been effected from it.
In July, 1835, a certain number of notorious prisoners conspired to dig,
at the north-east angle of the building, a subterranean passage, which
was at length carried into the garden of a house in the Rue Coupeau.
This passage was eighteen metres long. Twenty-eight men thereby regained
their liberty, this being the most daring escape which was ever planned
and executed at Sainte-Pélagie. Two months afterwards the Comte de
Richmond, calling himself the son of Louis XVI., contrived to get away
with two of his fellow-prisoners, Duclerc and Rossignol. The count had
somehow procured the key of the gridiron gate separating the ground
floor of the east pavilion from a courtyard. Then with his hat on, with
papers under his arm, and followed by his two companions, he was
proceeding to one of the principal exits when a sentinel challenged him.
Richmond declared himself the governor, and presented his two friends,
one as the registrar, the other as his architect. The sentinel let them
pass, and the three prisoners quietly proceeded on their way, ultimately
escaping by a final gate, the key of which was in the count’s
possession.
[Illustration: THE CHAPEL, LA GRANDE ROQUETTE.]
Of yet another ingenious escape an Englishman named Thomas Jackson,
under a sentence of five years, was the hero. He hoisted himself up from
the central pavilion by a false window and, by means of a cord provided
with a stout hook at the end, gained the roofs, along which he stole to
the exterior wall, where, still with the aid of his rope, he managed to
let himself down to the ground uninjured and without exciting suspicion,
favoured, as he had been, by a dark night and a deluge of rain.
* * * * *
Saint-Lazare, a house of detention and correction for women, is situated
in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. Before arriving at its ultimate
destination, this prison had to pass through sundry historical phases,
some of them sufficiently curious. It was at first, as its name
indicates, a leper hospital; and already at the beginning of the twelfth
century it existed on the road from Paris to Saint-Denis, built, as it
had been, upon the ruins of an old basilica dedicated to Saint-Lawrence.
Louis le Gros established for its benefit the fair of Saint-Ladre, which
was held annually in front of the hospital and lasted eight days. This
fair was, under Philip Augustus, replaced by the fair of Saint-Lawrence.
Like most lazarettos, the hospital of Saint-Lazare was composed of an
assemblage of little compartments, in which each leper lived isolated.
It is recorded by a monk of Saint-Denis, Odéon de Deuil by name, that in
1147 Louis VII., carrying the royal standard to Saint-Denis previously
to his departure for the Crusades, visited the lepers in their cells.
The bakers of France, who, it appears, were more exposed to leprosy than
any other body of men, owing to the action of the fire upon their skin,
made it their particular concern to contribute towards the maintenance
of Saint-Lazare, and sent large gifts of bread to it. In return, its
doors were always open to any baker attacked with the malady.
From 1515 until the seventeenth century Saint-Lazare was managed, or
mismanaged, by the canons of Saint-Victor, who established themselves
there as in a great abbey, and consumed the rich revenues of the
institution. The leprosy was turned out of doors, or at least the canons
would only receive certain ecclesiastics afflicted with leprosy. In 1630
the reform of this degenerate establishment was confided to
Saint-Vincent de Paul, who installed there, under the name of
“congregation of Saint-Lazare,” a regular staff of priests to tend the
sick. It was in the convent of Saint-Lazare that Vincent de Paul died.
He was interred in the choir at the foot of the high altar. His tomb,
bearing a commemorative inscription, was still visible in 1789.
Ten years after the Revolution a portion of Saint-Lazare was employed as
a house of correction for men, as well as a depository for persons
suddenly and arbitrarily arrested. It was there that, shortly after the
famous first representation of the _Marriage of Figaro_, Beaumarchais
was shut up, after having been brutally dragged from his home. This
iniquitous arrest, which nothing could excuse or extenuate, caused such
a stir in Paris that the brilliant dramatist was set free within three
days.
On the 13th of July, 1789, the eve of the taking of the Bastille, the
convent of Saint-Lazare was pillaged. Paris was suffering from famine,
and the report got abroad that in the immense buildings of the cloister
large quantities of wheat and flour were concealed. The popular
suspicions proved to be well founded. Enormous supplies of cereals,
wines, and victuals of every description were discovered, and the
inmates, who had represented themselves as entirely destitute, were
ignominiously chased out of doors. Unhappily the famished invaders, once
in possession of the booty, abandoned themselves to all kinds of
excesses. The barns were set on fire, and the flames for some time
threatened the whole quarter with destruction.
Converted into a prison, Saint-Lazare received a great number of
suspects. Some of its guests were now sufficiently illustrious: the
great poet, André Chenier, for instance. Within its walls Chenier wrote,
for a female prisoner, one of his most beautiful elegies, as well as
some of his famous iambics. After, the Consulate Saint-Lazare became at
once a civil prison, an administrative prison, and a house of
correction. Amongst other classes of offenders detained there were women
sentenced to less than a year’s imprisonment, or in debt to the State,
or convicted of adultery, as well as girls under age whose parents had
shut them up for correction.
This vast and sombre prison, with its decrepit walls and its sinister
aspect, consists of five great blocks of buildings surrounding three
courtyards planted with trees. A road encircles and isolates the whole.
The buildings are four-storeyed, sufficiently well ventilated, and
capable of accommodating twelve hundred offenders. The women immured at
Saint-Lazare are divided into three categories. The first consists of
women convicted of crimes or misdemeanours; the second of girls under
age condemned for indiscreet conduct to remain till their majority in a
house of correction, as also of girls whose parents have incarcerated
them on a judge’s order, and girls below sixteen, detained for
vagabondage or prostitution. The third category is composed of abandoned
women administratively detained.
[Illustration: THE CHAPEL-SCHOOL, LA PETITE ROQUETTE.]
This last category, entirely isolated from the two others, is itself
divided into three classes: the old, the mutinous, and the young. The
old culprits are naturally the most resigned to their fate; some even
prefer it to liberty. In 1830 a great many of them, forcibly ejected
into a state of freedom, returned the same evening to Saint-Lazare. The
mutinous ward is occupied by loose women who are refractory to all
discipline. It is here that conspiracies are hatched against the prison
regulations, and that language is used which no slang dictionary would
dare to reproduce. The ward of the young contains those fallen women who
are not yet hardened by a long course of vice. It is towards these that
moralising influences are chiefly directed; though the attempts to
reform them have not, on the whole, been highly successful. Against
women of recognised immorality the state laws are notoriously severe.
Slighter offences, such as appearing in the street at prohibited hours,
venturing out of doors bareheaded, or with an air of solicitation, and
drinking to excess, are punished with fifteen days’ to three months’
imprisonment. For graver offences, such as insulting the doctors
attached to the administration, or making determined overtures to
pedestrians, the minimum term of imprisonment is three months, the
maximum close upon a year.
The female warders of the different sections are sisters of the order of
Saint-Joseph. All the prisoners are employed at needlework, and receive
weekly a slender remuneration for so much as they have done. They labour
together in vast workshops. The women under correction sleep isolated,
in cells; the others sleep, four by four, in rooms or in large
dormitories, where, a few years since, it was complained that they were
strewn about pell-mell, and so crowded together that their beds
frequently touched.
[Illustration: THE POLITICAL QUARTER, SAINTE-PÉLAGIE.]
A very able writer, who has made a special study of the régime of
different prisons, M. Maxime Ducamp, furnishes statistics showing that
in one average year Saint-Lazare gave accommodation to 2,859 ordinary
criminals; 232 young girls, of less than sixteen, under correction; and
4,831 unfortunates “administratively” detained, not to mention some 200
women who were infirm.
It is complained that notwithstanding all the divisions and subdivisions
which have been made to prevent communication between the different
sections of prisoners, the greatest promiscuity reigns at Saint-Lazare.
Philanthropists and journalists have constantly raised their voice in
the matter, and demanded that a special house should be instituted for
young girls in which they would not get corrupted. “Every young girl who
enters under correction at Saint-Lazare,” says M. Maxime Ducamp, “issues
thence vicious and polluted to the depths of her heart. I have been
turning over the leaves of two prayer-books found on a child of hardly
sixteen, detained for three months, on the application of her father, in
this accursed house, where the walls reek with vice. On the margins the
little prisoner has written her thoughts; frequently the dates are
indicated, and one can thus follow the progress of her ideas. The study
is appalling.” The moral atmosphere of the place, that is to say, was
one which the girl could scarcely breathe; though by degrees she became
acclimatised, until her last reflections were an outrage against not
only virtue, but nature itself.
* * * * *
We will conclude this chapter on the prisons of Paris with a few general
observations.
On the question of hygiene most of the governors of Paris prisons state,
in their reports, that little on this head remains to be desired.
Certain exceptions, however, must be made, as in the case of ancient
convents whose age renders a perfect adaptation impossible. Now it is
the dormitories which are defective, because the cubic quantity of air
required by the regulations cannot be obtained; now it is the courts,
which, as the sun can never penetrate to them, become damp and
unwholesome; now it is the workshops, which are ill-suited to the
industries exercised within them. On the whole, however, the central
prisons are healthy enough.
On the subject of food--one of the most important of hygienic
considerations--the authorities have had this problem to solve: to avoid
imposing such rigorous deprivations as would border upon inhumanity,
whilst equally avoiding such a dietary system as would lend an
attraction to the prisons, and cause destitute wretches to prefer
confinement to their ordinary life of liberty. The regulation diet is at
present as follows:--a daily ration of bread weighing 750 grammes for
men and 650 for women; in the morning, on ordinary days, a bowl of
vegetable soup with bread in it, and on Sundays, Thursdays, and fête
days, a bowl of meat soup; in the evening similar soup, accompanied, on
ordinary days, by a small quantity of dry vegetables, such as potatoes,
peas, and lentils, and on Sundays and fête days by a portion of meat,
without bone, weighing at least 75 grammes, as well as at least 3
decilitres of potatoes.
The ordinary beverage is pure water. During the months of June, July,
and August, however, the administration requires that a refreshing drink
be supplied to the prisoners. This is made from gentian, hops, leaves of
the walnut-tree, molasses, and lemon.
The régime of prisoners in the infirmaries is chiefly determined by the
medical officers, though there are state regulations even on this
subject. The régime of the infirmary is very indulgent, and invalids
confined there are practically, for the time being, not treated as
prisoners at all.
As to the sleeping arrangements, the bedstead now generally employed is
of iron, with a base of trellis work or wire gauze. It is furnished with
a mattress, a pair of sheets, one blanket in summer and two in winter.
Of cleanliness a great point, of course, is made. The prisoner, on his
first introduction into prison, is stripped and bathed, and has his hair
and beard cut off. The tresses of the women, however, remain unshorn;
though formerly female prisoners, to their own furious indignation, were
deprived of this their chief adornment. According to one article of the
prison regulations, a footbath must be furnished to each prisoner at
least once in two months, and a large bath at least twice a year. It is
to be hoped that the officials of the different prisons do not really
limit those under their charge to such an atrociously infrequent
application of necessary water.
[Illustration: THE COURTYARD, SAINT-LAZARE.]
The infirmaries are very competently organised. To each metropolitan
prison at least one doctor is attached. The prisoners may have a medical
consultation whenever they apply for it; though they are not admitted to
the infirmary without a doctor’s certificate, except in urgent cases.
The temperature of the infirmary is regulated according to the season
or, more precisely, the weather. The rest of the prison is only heated
when the weather is very rigorous. The total number of patients admitted
to the infirmary in 1869 was 12,982 men and 2,489 women. These figures
may at first appear somewhat formidable; but two facts must be borne in
mind: first, that a stay in the infirmary is much coveted by prisoners,
who get themselves entered on the sick list under the slightest pretext;
secondly, that the population of the Paris prisons is generally an
unhealthy one, already degenerated through excesses or anterior
maladies. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that long isolation,
insufficient exercise, and perhaps also inadequate food, produce a
grievous effect on the health of the inmates. It is found, indeed, that
prisoners who have been long confined are peculiarly liable to become
invalided; and this is in particular the case with women. In 1869, out
of a given number of convicts, nearly three times as many were in the
infirmary during the fourth year of confinement as during the first.
That most patients, however, enter the infirmary in consequence of
anterior conditions, is shown by the statistics for 1869, considerably
more than half having been afflicted with previous maladies or bad
constitutions.
The hours of compulsory prison labour are regulated by the State. The
organisation of the labour system leaves, on one point at least,
something to be desired. A double object ought to be held in view by the
authorities, namely, to ensure for the prisoner sufficient resources to
exempt him, on his liberation, from temptation to mendicancy or theft,
and to develop in him such habits of industry as will procure him an
honest livelihood out in the world. The institution of the “peculium,”
or private fund, is of the first necessity for this purpose. At present
each prisoner has a peculium, or at all events it is within his power to
create one. The slender proceeds of his labour form an accumulation for
this fund. The longer his imprisonment and the greater the difficulty
experienced in obtaining work on his discharge, the larger should be the
stock of money intended to keep his hands out of other people’s pockets.
As a matter of fact, however, in the case of ill-regulated prisoners,
nine-tenths of the fund is sometimes deducted before they are liberated.
Involuntary thieves are thus let loose upon society.
The central prisons of Paris inspire the criminal classes with a
wholesome dread, due, in a very large measure, to the exasperating
monotony of the life led within their walls. Many medical authorities
hold that more diversion and variety should be afforded. Continued year
after year upon long-sentence prisoners, the monotony is sure to prey,
more or less, upon the mind; and the cases of atony and other mental
diseases attributable to this cause are unfortunately by no means few.
[Illustration]