Tag: penal colony
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On This Day in 1953 – France’s last inmates return from Devil’s Island.
“The Bagne is a charnel house, a mass grave, running from syphilis to tuberculosis, with all the tropical diseases one can imagine (carrying malaria, ankylosis, amoebic dysentery, leprosy, etc.), all destined to work hand in hand with an Administration whose task it is to diminish the number of prisoners consigned to its care. The fiercest…
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Devil’s Island – Colony of the condemned.
‘The policy of the Administration is to kill, not to better or reclaim.’ – Rene Belbenoit. It is 1852. In France, Emperor Napoleon III, increasingly worried by rising crime and insufficient colonists to consolidate France’s empire, devises a new, dreadful solution. Napoleon isn’t interested in social reform, he’s interested in social cleansing where criminals can…