The French Empire
As early as 1552 the French used convicts on colonial expeditions in the north Atlantic, although before the nineteenth century it was more common for criminals to be sentenced to galley service in Brest, Toulon and other French ports.35 On occasion, however, petty criminals were sold as engages or indentured servants with around 600 shipped to Louisiana between 1719 and 1721.
The practice ceased because of high death rates and the falling share price of the West Indies Company, although between 1721 and 1749 a further 720 were exiled to Canada for offences that included poaching, smuggling and selling untaxed salt.36 The Seven Years’ War cut short the transportation of convicts to New France, and there appears to have been no further attempt to ship convicts overseas until the 1790s. During the French Revolution small numbers of political prisoners (under 700) were exiled to Cayenne (French Guiana). Despite high death rates, the policy was not abandoned until the Portuguese occupied the colony in 1809.37 The reform of the penal code in 1810 formally restricted transportation to political offenders, although the lack of a suitable site meant that in practice the punishment was not used.French courts reintroduced transportation in 1848 as a punishment for non-political offences. The first contingent of 2,200 convicts arrived in French Guiana in 1852, directed to work ‘in the most painful tasks of colonization and all other works of public utility’.38 While penal legislation made favourable reference to the British penal colonies in Australia, the abolition of slavery within the French Empire in 1848 provided a more immediate stimulus.39 The first convicts to arrive in Cayenne were set to work clearing the Iles du Salut for cultivation and building. Shortly afterwards an agricultural establishment was set up near the mouth of the Oyapock River on the site of a former sugar plantation, with ex-slaves used as convict overseers.40 The subsequent introduction of Indian indentured workers into Guiana after 1861 added a further layer of complexity to this interconnected history of labour exploitation.
Annual death rates of 11 per cent necessitated the shifting of the first settlements in Guiana to higher ground. This did little to alleviate the problem, and of the first 8,000 French bagnards transported to South America, half were dead by 1857. As in Portuguese Angola, repeated experimentation with new locations failed to solve the problem and the colonial administration was forced to conclude that Europeans were unsuitable for hard labour in the tropics.41 While colonial subjects from Algeria, Senegal and Indo-China continued to be sent to Guiana, a new European penal colony was established in New Caledonia. It operated from 1864 to 1922, although the last convict shipment arrived in 1897.42
During this period at least 22,000 prisoners landed in New Caledonia, including 5,000 political exiles of the 1871 Paris Commune. Although the annual death rates were lower than those of Guiana, at 2 to 3 per cent, they remained high by the standards of the British settlement in Australia.43 Well-behaved prisoners were put to outdoor labour on public works projects, or hired out to private individuals. In some cases land grants were provided for expirees in the hope of encouraging long-term settlement. Many argued, however, that penal transportation acted as a brake on free migration, and so colonists campaigned for abolition.44 At the same time, others argued that New Caledonia amounted to a tropical paradise for the convicts and called for harsher measures. Thus in 1887 metropolitan transportation to Guiana resumed for serious offenders. Following the cessation of transportation to New Caledonia in 1897, the bagne in Guiana once more became the sole terminus of French civilian transportation policy. The last prisoner was released in 1953, and estimates of transported convicts range up to 70,000.
A system of French military transportation operated in parallel to the Guiana and New Caledonia schemes. While the French army made use of penal battalions after 1818, they became increasingly associated with colonial service following the occupation of Algeria in 1830. Initially three Bataillons d’Infanterie Legere d’Afrique were established in 1832—1833; with two more added in 1888. These were manned by military convicts and prisoners sentenced to between three months and three years followed by service as a conscript. After the 1848 revolution 6,000 political and civilian prisoners were also sent to the military bagne in Africa.45 The batallions laboured in construction work and colonial engagements in Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia as well as the Crimea (1854—1856), Syria (1860-1861) and Mexico (1862-1867). Over 600,000 people served in the convict forces, including during the First World War in France. Between 1832 and 1972, when the last company was disbanded in French Somalia, men served as conscripts in penal units in colonial theatres.46