FROM THE GALLEYS TO DEVIL’S ISLAND

Here is a very well documented and graphically  illustrated history of prisoners and prison life in France. It tells the whole terrible story from the infamous galleys of Marseilles, to which prisoners were sent before the Revolution, to the overseas hells like Devil’s Island and the present day system.

M. Bourdet-Pleville is both a scholar and a humanitarian. His earlier works, one of which won the Academie Francaise Prize and the Academie de Marine Prize, were all in the field of marine history. Likewise, the early part of Justice in Chains gives a valuable picture of life on board the galleys of the kings of France. But when the last galley has rotted away and the chiourme, that miserable herd of human outcasts, takes its sores and chains ashore, the author goes with them on their sad, shuffling procession through the jails of France and New Caledonia and Guiana and back again.

His descriptions of their initiation into both civilian and military prison life, the relations between the prisoners, and the new psychology they develop in such places, conjure up a nightmare world that has seldom been successfully discussed outside the works of Balzac and Eugene Sue.

The author’s careful research is given life by a sense of mounting indignation and the whole work becomes an argument, all the more weighty because of its factual content , for penal reform.