A rare survival: the earliest, and hitherto, unrecorded map of the penal colony or “bagne” in Saint-Laurent du Maroni in French Guiana, at the border with Surinam. This prison complex was made famous by the book and film Papillon and was also known as the Green Hell.
Due to the over-crowding of French prisons, in 1854 Louis Napoleon decreed the establishment of a new penal colony. Following the abolition of slavery in 1848, the then quiet Saint-Laurent du Maroni proved an ideal location, fit for re-purpose. In what was little more than a village, a center of peninteniary administration and primary place of detention was planned in 1857 and opened in 1859. Convicts would land at the “Camp de la Transportation” and this manuscript plan shows the first buildings and planned expansion of the complex in 1859.
The present plan is the earliest map of that area that we could find. While undated, it shows a few buildings that were already finished and other proposed places for buildings to be constructed in 1859, such as a church (“emplacement probable de l’eglise”), which allows us to date the map to no later than 1859. The earliest other maps that we’ve located are from 1868 (Collection MUCEM, FRANOM_COL_H54_001) and 1872 (Coll. Archives territoriales de Guyane, Cote 1Fi57). These show a significantly enlarged and developed complex.
The penal colony was developed under the direction of commodore Laurent Baudin and it was named after him. Large walls were not needed; the river and jungle served as a natural prison. The conditions in French Guiana were poor, for prisoners and officials alike, and the mortality rate as a result high. It is commonly perceived that the prisoners were white French men, but Merle 2019 describes that “far from constituting a homogeneous category, the entity of the ‘convict’ is fragmented according to administrative categorizations which organize social relations inside and outside camp walls. One such category, based on race, remains understudied. Depending on the year, between 20% and 60% of convicts transported to French Guiana were from France’s North African colonies and categorized as Arabs.”
Drawn on tracing paper over an extant map, it is a small miracle that it has survived because the material is so fragile and the place where it was made was extremely humid. The very brittle and yellowed tracing paper (known as papier végétal in French) was used since the early nineteenth century. Despite the damages, this is an important colonial manuscript map.
Coquet, Marine. “Totalisation carcérale en terre coloniale: la carcéralisation à Saint-Laurent- du-Maroni (xixe-xxe siècles)”, in Cultures & Conflits, 90, 2013, pp59-76; Donet-Vincent D., De soleil et de silences, histoire des bagnes de Guyane, Paris, La Boutique de l’Histoire, 2003; Merle, Isabelle & Coquet, Marine. (2019). “The Penal World in the French Empire: A Comparative Study of French Transportation and its Legacy in Guyana and New Caledonia” in The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 47, pp247-274; Toth, Stephen A. Beyond Papillon, The French Overseas Penal Colonies, 1854-1952 (Lincoln & London, University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
