The Devilish History of Devil’s Island

It’s a long way from Paris to an island prison in South America, but the reverberations from the journey of just one man from the French capital to an outpost of French Guiana traveled even further than the 7,000-kilometer ocean crossing endured by Alfred Dreyfus in 1895.

“The hapless Captain Dreyfus,” was, as Nancy Fitch wrote in her review of Ruth Harris’s book The Man on Devil’s Island: Alfred Dreyfus and the Affair that Divided France,

the Jewish officer unjustly accused of treason after a cleaning-lady, who stole documents for the government, found a suspicious note in a waste-paper-basket in the German Embassy. Suspicious of Dreyfus as a Jew and as an outsider from the École polytechnique, unsavoury army officers secretly arrested him, brought in some forensic experts with dubious theories and convicted him of treason in a court-martial. The army then publicly stripped the Captain of his rank and sentenced him to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island off the coast of French Guiana.

“J’accuse…!” wrote the author Émile Zola in one of the most famous newspaper editorials of all time, lambasting the French government for antisemitism and accusing the army of a cover-up in maintaining its stance that Dreyfus was guilty.

By the time Dreyfus arrived, the trio of islands off the coast of French Guiana, part of the territory that France colonized in the 1640s, had long been collectively known as Devil’s Island. It had been an unhappy experiment from the beginning, as American historian and heritage studies scholar David Lowenthal—then a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin—explains in an article published in The Hispanic American Historical Review in 1952.

“French gentlemen-adventurers,” Lowenthal writes,

devoid of capital and common sense, lacking persistence and qualities of leadership, invariably failed; their solders and servants found strenuous labor unsupportable in the tropical lowlands, and either died or ran off to seek easier fortunes in the West Indies. By the middle of the eighteenth century, French Guiana was the home of five hundred Europeans and ten times as many [enslaved laborers]. For half a century the colony had stagnated under the maladministration of three generations of d’Orvilliers; those who could do so departed, and all that remained was a “spindling and inert group of derelict colonials.”

Efforts to utilize French Guiana’s vast natural resources ended in disaster on multiple occasions, the jungle interior taking on a reputation perhaps only equaled by Joseph Conrad’s deeply colonial descriptions of the Congo Free State in Heart of Darkness almost a century later. Librarian and Caribbean historian Joseph A. Boromé detailed a particularly costly misadventure, both in terms of human lives and financial losses in a 1967 issue of Caribbean Studies. “During the eighteenth century,” Boromé writes,

the agricultural possibilities of Guiana continued to be trumpeted… Yet failure followed upon failure. The most notorious occurred in 1764–1765 when the Due de Choiseul and the Due de Preslin sent out some 12,000 Alsatians to colonize a concession they had obtained between the Kourou and Maroni rivers. Landed during the rainy season in a swamp, the emigrants found neither fresh water nor waterproof dwellings awaiting them, though they were shortly regaled with a supply of skates! The badly bungled experiment took more than 10,000 Alsatian lives, shook the colony to its foundations, blemished the reputations of the governor and intendant, and cost the French treasury the staggering sum of thirty million francs.

Hot, wet, insect-ridden, and with a climate that made early colonists exceptionally susceptible to disease, the islands became the center of an idea formulated in Paris in the mid-nineteenth century. Parts of the dense, equatorial mainland, as well as the islands that lay off the shore of the nascent capital, Cayenne, would be turned into labor camps and prisons for the most serious criminal offenders in mainland France.

Thousands of alleged criminals—some innocent, many not—were sent to Devil’s Island over the next century, including Dreyfus. It was a sentence that carried with it a high probability of death, whether by the guillotine, tropical maladies, or from barbaric treatment by the prison’s notoriously sadistic guards.

The dehumanizing treatment prisoners received on Devil’s Island was, in effect, a continuation of the barbarity long inflicted on French Guiana’s enslaved population. The practice of slavery continued long after the abolition of the slave trade by France in 1818, with enslavers supported by the state for acts of astonishing, wanton violence. In 1820, writes historian of France and the French overseas empire Miranda Spieler, Guiana became “the destination for all slaves seized aboard illegal ships by the [French] Navy while enforcing the new ban on the trade.”

In a  2015 study, Spieler describes the treatment of those shipped to Guiana, who “became nègres du roi—slaves of the king” on arrival, in horrific detail. Efforts by the French state to hold members of the planter class in Guiana accountable for abuse “met with predictable local resistance,” she writes. Planters claimed they held the sole and incontestable right to punish enslaved workers. In 1824, she writes, the local administration

argued that “that slaves were not justiciable except by their masters.” Events the next year tested the strength of that conviction. In distinct judicial affairs that happened roughly at the same time, Guiana’s prosecutor general, a recent transplant from France, accused two masters of barbarity toward recaptured maroons; both cases also concerned the punishment of slaves with weapons forbidden by the Code Noir, including a huge baton and unspecified instruments déchirants––perhaps a cat-o-nine tails. In April 1825, local magistrates declined to indict the planter Langlois, who stood accused of mutilating the slaves Gabriel (age 9 or 10) and Melchior (age 19). In May 1825, judges acquitted the plantation manager Bancal of inhumanely punishing the slave Afrique––“guilty on numerous occasions of marronnage [escape]”––whom he struck sixty-five times with a type of truncheon that opened his skull, inflicting a wound that continued to suppurate two months later.

Slavery wasn’t abolished across France and its colonies until 1848, but as Lowenthal writes, in some ways it continued, as Napoleon III formalized French Guiana’s status as a penal colony in 1852, with political prisoners primarily isolated on Devil’s Island.

Dreyfus was eventually exonerated and released from Devil’s Island by the French Supreme Court in 1906. His persecution meant that, suddenly, the conditions for prisoners in French Guiana had come to the attention of the world, a new reality that had huge consequences for career criminal Eddie Guerin.

Guerin, a safe cracker and bank robber, was sent to Devil’s Island by a French court but managed to escape in a boat made from a scooped-out tree trunk, ending up in the UK. Attempts to extradite him from London back to France were thwarted partially due to the new awareness of the depravity that reigned in the island jail. Robert J. Sharpe explains that “Guerin was convinced that everyone, even the judges who heard his case, was influenced by the Dreyfus affair.” The case formally turned on “the burden of proof on habeas corpus,” writes Sharpe, but

Guerin noted that everyone “…had read all about the treatment to which Dreyfus had been subjected [and agreed that] whatever I had done it was not sufficiently bad to condemn me to a poisonous hole where men rotted away and were never heard of for ever more.” The Dreyfus case was very current in the public mind when Guerin was apprehended in 1908 and it presented the French justice and penal system in the worst possible light.

While Guerin was able to avoid extradition by claiming to be a British subject, “he was presented as the man who had the courage to escape the same filthy penal colony in which Dreyfus had suffered,” writes Sharpe. And

[a] man who had escaped from the horrors of Devil’s Island was bound to attract public sympathy. One hardly need adhere to the realist or critical legal studies schools of jurisprudence to suggest that these factors might tip the balance in an area where the law was uncertain.

The penal colonies of French Guiana were finally, permanently closed in 1953; their remains are now a macabre tourist attraction for the few visitors that make it to Cayenne.

Today, French Guiana is an overseas department and region of France. Its interior is still only navigable by river; nonetheless, it has become known for its technology-driven economy, thanks to the presence of the Guiana Space Centre. Opened in 1968 on the site of another former prison in Kourou, the space center stands just five degrees north of the equator. Here, the faster surface velocity of the rotating Earth means that a rocket can deliver around 24 percent more power than one fired from the Kennedy Space Center but with the same amount of thrust.

From myopic confinement to the outer reaches of space, the view from Devil’s Island and French Guiana has spread significantly outwards.

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