The penal colonies: from utopia to potential case dismissal
Résumé
The penal colonies established in France’s colonies, where hard time was as much to distance criminals from Metropolitan France as it was to eliminate them, were intended for political prisoners, criminals condemned to hard labor, and, under the Third Republic, repeat offenders.
These penal colonies were the product of two intersecting utopic visions : the idea of reforming individuals through work, and that of colonization via forced exile. These two dreams were developed under the Ancien Regime when massive deportations occurred, but penal exile did not become a
systematic form of politics until the Revolution when the deportation of common-law repeat offenders was written into the first French
Penal Code. The approaches and sources that can be used to study penal colonies are numerous. This dossier leaves many paths unexplored, but it will have achieved its goal if it helps prevent reductive simplifications of the penal experience. We shouldn’t allow the perceived exoticism of the penal colonies overseas to distance us from what is our own penal history. It is tempting to see the history of such institutions as picturesque or as caricature, which separates these realities from contemporary forms of punishment. This doomed utopic vision is nevertheless the consequence of a penal construct that remains itself a part of our current existence.
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