"Modern Europe, 1750–1950." a Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies

Gibson, Mary, and Ilaria Poerio. "Modern Europe, 1750–1950." A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies. Ed. Clare Anderson. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 337–370. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 29 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350000704.ch-012>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 29 September 2021, 03:09 UTC. Copyright © Clare Anderson and Contributors 2018. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 12 Modern Europe, 1750–1950 Mary Gibson and Ilaria Poerio Research on penal colonies is relatively rare in the growing historiography on European punishment. In the quest to identify the ‘birth of the prison’, – in Michel Foucault’s memorable phrase – efforts have concentrated instead on the establishment of the modern penitentiary as a symbol of European modernity.1 While debates continue about the motives for the birth of the prison, it is agreed that by the nineteenth century European nations shared an ideological commitment to replacing corporal punishment with rehabilitation through education, work, and religion in healthy and orderly institutions. European penal reformers contrasted their liberal and humanitarian vision, intended to mould useful citizens, to the supposedly backward and brutal methods of retribution that characterized the purportedly less civilized continents of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Even the transportation of convicts from European nations to their colonies has remained, until recently, more central to the histories of the non-Western world than to Europe itself. Thus a simplistic duality has marked the historiography of punishment, one that identifies the modern penitentiary with Europe (and North America) and the penal colony with the rest of the globe. Yet the penal colony not only preceded the birth of the prison in Europe but has continued to co-exist with the modern penitentiary into the post-Second World War era. Most well known are the Nazi concentration camps that interned political opponents, Jews and other despised racial and religious groups, and ‘asocials’ such as homosexuals and the ‘workshy’. Other interwar dictators, most notably Mussolini in Italy and Franco in Spain, also relegated those individuals labelled as enemies of the state to penal colonies. While these twentieth-century camps were distinctive in their use of systematic terror to crush political opposition, their form had roots in much earlier carceral institutions. As far back as the eighteenth century, many European monarchies had established hard labour camps to replace the galleys as a punishment for serious offenders. These took two forms:bagnes , in the ports of seafaring nations such as France, Italy and Spain; and colonies for public works in the interior of central and northern European states. In some cases, such as the Italian policy of domicilio coatto, hard labour camps were under the direct control of police rather than the courts. Despite the association of these premodern penal colonies with the galley slavery of the old regime, many survived the transition to the new parliamentary states of the nineteenth century. 338 A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies Although nineteenth-century liberal reformers expressed shame about these penal camps inherited from the former monarchies, many began to advocate the establishment of a new model of outdoor punishment, the agricultural colony. They argued that, unlike the enclosed penitentiary, the agricultural colony was particularly suited to bring about the rehabilitation of certain categories of prisoners. One of these was wayward and delinquent youth, whose reform would be hastened by removal from the corruption and filth of the city. With the establishment of the juvenile reformatory at Mettray in 1840, the French inspired a host of other nations to favour rural camps for the punishment of minors. Agricultural colonies were also deemed appropriate for male peasants, whose labour skills could contribute to farming and land reclamation. Although these adult agricultural colonies shared many characteristics with the hard labour camps of the early modern era, reformers recast the value of outdoor work from that of repression through painful heavy labour to reform through healthy occupations in the countryside. The longevity of the penal colony depended on its adaptability to different purposes and its shifting valence in public discourse. The flexibility of the penal colony and its employment in different national guises throughout Europe raises the problem of definition. Identification is easier in the imperial context, where all discrete sites outside the metropole in the modern era potentially qualify as penal colonies. The question is murkier in Europe, where exile was internal. This chapter explores sites of punishment with most, if not all, of the following characteristics. First, the location of penal colonies was rural and separated from urban areas either by large stretches of land or by water. Inmates spent most of their day working outside, and dormitories did not resemble the modern penitentiary in architecture or organization. Second, the residents of such camps were ‘criminalized’ – but not necessarily convicted – individuals who were deemed worthy of punishment. Agents of internment included the regular courts, special military or political tribunals, police and, in the case of children, parents. Thus inmates included both convicts serving prescribed sentences and suspects in preventive detention. Third, labour, central to the mission of the penal colony, was physically taxing and often brutal. In most cases, the purpose was retribution rather than reform. By spending little on prisoner upkeep and subjecting prisoners to hard labour, the state strove to maximize profit rather than offer convicts the opportunity to acquire useful professional skills. All of these characteristics differentiated penal colonies from the modern penitentiary which, at least in theory, was organized architecturally as a cellular structure, punished only convicted criminals according to due process and sought to rehabilitate inmates through training in healthy, indoor workshops. This chapter will trace the development of penal colonies in Western Europe from the bagnes of the eighteenth century to the death camps established during the Second World War.2 The various types of camps for refugees and immigrants established after the Second World War did not officially exercise a penal function and therefore will not be included. Because of the paucity of research on the earliest camps and the number of nations involved, it is impossible to draw up an international map of all European penal colonies or to provide statistical totals across borders. However, we have detected several general trends over the last few centuries with the First World War providing an important pivot point. First, the absolute monarchies of the eighteenth century and Modern Europe, 1750–1950 339 parliamentary nation states of the nineteenth applied the punishment of internal exile mostly to common criminals, while the dictatorships of the twentieth century targeted political dissidents. Second, most penal colonies formed part of the regular judicial system in the earlier era but developed into autonomous, extra-legal institutions of punishment in the interwar period. Third, while most early penal colonies were reserved for men and boys before the First World War, they became increasingly mixed in terms of gender in the twentieth century. Finally, race replaced class as the defining characteristic of inmate populations as specific ethnic and religious groups – such as the Jews in Germany, Slavs in Italy and Catalonians in Spain – replaced the ‘dangerous’ popular classes as the object of repressive policies utilizing internal exile and hard labour. In sum, the period before the First World War was characterized by experimentation and variety in the types of colonies, while the twentieth century saw a stabilization and consolidation of the technologies and mechanisms of persecution across Europe. However, the entire history of the modern penal colony is beset with contradictions between tradition/modernity and repression/reform that do follow a clear linear evolution. While chastisement was dominant, some types of camps simultaneously promised rehabilitation. This chapter seeks to explore the complicated chronology of European penal colonies as well as to analyse their dialectical relation to non-western penal institutions as both models for colonial hard labour camps and recipients of disciplinary ideologies and techniques from imperial experiments abroad. Experimentation, 1750–1914 Hard labour camps While hard labour camps are identified with the old regime, they appeared only near the end of the early modern period. In the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, punishment rarely involved confinement or the requirement to work. Corporal punishment, which took a variety of forms, constituted the penalty for many crimes. Most notorious was the death penalty, sometimes aggravated by drawing and quartering or burning at the stake, although its frequency varied widely over time and place. Less drastic types of bodily mutilation, which caused pain and sometimes permanent shame, included the cutting of noses and ears, branding, and whipping. Other frequent punishments were fines, levied in some parts of Europe

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