French Guiana. Patrick Chamoiseau

      The absence of memorialization of the bagne is one of the most striking examples of postcolonial amnesia in the French-speaking world. Omitted—like most other locations relating to colonial expansionism—from Pierre Nora’s Realms of Memory project (the seven volumes of which appeared between 1984 and 1992), the penal colony epitomizes the ways in which memories of colonial empire have been filtered, distorted, singularized, and often repressed. The bagne constituted nevertheless a carceral archipelago, a network of sites scattered across France itself (where prisons in the port cities of Brest, La Rochelle, and Toulon were complemented by penal colonies for young offenders), North Africa (location of the infamous “Biribi” or military prisons and forced labour camps), and elsewhere in the colonial empire (most notably French Guiana, New Caledonia and Vietnam).¹

      French Guiana had served as the destination for political dissidents during the French Revolution, but it was in 1854 that Napoleon III signed a decree relating to forced labour that turned the South American colony into a formal penitential destination for civil transportees from France and the wider French colonial empire.² (They would as a result of legislation in 1885 be joined also by recidivists, prisoners guilty of repeated petty crimes.) The logic and function of the penal colony were clear: on the one hand, it permitted the location far from France or other colonies of those considered politically and socially undesirable; on the other, it provided the workforce for the colonization of a country that had proved (and would continue to prove) stubbornly resistant to imperial expansionism and settlement. The conditions were harsh, for convicts, warders, and colonial administrators alike, even on the supposedly more salubrious Salvation’s Islands where the impact of tropical diseases was reduced. Prisoners were moreover subject to a regime of doublage, meaning that convicts sentenced to less than eight years of hard labour were obliged to remain in French Guiana for a period equal to their original sentence whilst those sent for more than eight years were exiled for life.

      The mortality rate was such that, from 1864, French metropolitan convicts were diverted to the newly established penal colony of New Caledonia. The bagne in the Pacific operated for little more than sixty years, with transportation to there ended in 1897 after only three decades. The penal colony in French Guiana continued to function throughout this time, receiving convicts from elsewhere in the French colonial empire. With the closure of the penal establishments in Melanesia,