Memoirs of a Revolutionist · Part VI · Chapter 6 13 (1/2)

XIII

The trial was over, but I remained for another couple of months in the Lyons prison. Most of my comrades had lodged an appeal against the decision of the police court, and we had to wait for its results. With four more comrades, I refused to take any part in that appeal to a higher court, and continued to work in my pistole. A great friend of mine⁠—Martin, a clothier from Vienne⁠—took another pistole by the side of the one which I occupied, and as we were already condemned, we were allowed to take our walks together; and when we had something to say to each other between the walks, we used to correspond by means of taps on the wall, just as in Russia.

During my sojourn at Lyons I began to realize the awfully demoralizing influence of the prisons upon the prisoners, which brought me later to condemn unconditionally the whole institution.

The Lyons prison is a “modern” structure, built in the shape of a star, on the cellular system. The spaces between the rays of the star are occupied by small asphalt paved yards, and, weather permitting, the inmates are taken to these yards to work outdoors. The chief occupation is the beating out of silk cocoons to obtain floss silk. Flocks of children are also taken at certain hours to these yards. Thin, enervated, underfed⁠—the shadows of children⁠—I often watched them from my window. Anemia was plainly written on all the little faces and manifest in their thin, shivering bodies; and all day long⁠—not only in the dormitories, but even in the yards, in the full light of the sun⁠—they pursued their debilitating practices. What will become of them after they have passed through that schooling and come out with their health ruined, their wills annihilated, their energy reduced? Anemia, with its diminished energy, its unwillingness to work, its enfeebled will, weakened intellect, and perverted imagination, is responsible for crime to an infinitely greater extent than plethora, and it is precisely this enemy of the human race which is bred in prison. And then⁠—the teachings which these children receive in their surroundings! Mere isolation, even if it were rigorously carried out⁠—and it cannot be⁠—would be of little avail; the whole atmosphere of every prison is an atmosphere of glorification of that sort of gambling in “clever strokes” which constitutes the very essence of theft, swindling, and all sorts of similar antisocial deeds. Whole generations of future criminals are bred in these nurseries, which the state supports and which society tolerates, simply because it does not want to hear its own diseases spoken of and dissected. “Imprisoned in childhood, jail bird for life,” is what I heard afterwards from all those who were interested in criminal matters. And when I saw these children, and realized what they have to expect in the future, I could not but continually ask myself: “Which of them is the worse criminal?⁠—this child or the judge who condemns every year hundreds of children to this fate?” I gladly admit that the crime of the judge is unconscious. But are all the crimes for which people are sent to prison as conscious as they are supposed to be?

There was another point which I vividly realized from the very first weeks of my imprisonment, but which in some inconceivable way has escaped the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal law; namely, that imprisonment is in an immense number of cases a punishment which bears far more severely upon quite innocent people than upon the condemned prisoner himself.

Nearly every one of my comrades, who represented a fair average of the working population, had either wife and children to support, or a sister or old mother who depended for her living upon his earnings. Now being left without support, all of these women did their best to get work, and some of them got it; but none of them succeeded in earning regularly even as much as thirty cents (1 fr. 50 c.) a day. Nine francs (less than two dollars) and often only a dollar and a half a week to support themselves and their children⁠—these were their earnings. And that meant, of course, underfeeding, privations of all sorts, and deterioration of health, weakened intellect, impaired energy and willpower. I thus realized that what was going on in our law courts was in reality a condemnation of quite innocent people to all sorts of hardship; in most cases even worse than those to which the condemned man himself is subjected. The fiction is that the law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of degrading physical and mental hardships. But man is so made that whatever hardships may be imposed upon him, he gradually grows accustomed to them. If he cannot modify them, he accepts them, and after a certain time he puts up with them, just as he puts up with a chronic disease, and grows insensible to them. But during his imprisonment what becomes of his wife and children, or of the other innocent people who depended upon his support? They are punished even more cruelly than he himself is. And, in our routine habits of thought, no one ever thinks of the immense injustice which is thus committed. I realized it only from actual experience.

In the middle of March, 1883, twenty-two of us, who had been condemned to more than one year of imprisonment, were removed in great secrecy to the central prison of Clairvaux. It was formerly an abbey of St. Bernard, of which the great Revolution had made a house for the poor. Subsequently it became a house of detention and correction, which went among the prisoners and the officials themselves under the well-deserved nickname of “house of detention and corruption.”

So long as we were kept at Lyons we were treated as the prisoners under preliminary arrest are treated in France; that is, we had our own clothes, we could get our own food from a restaurant, and one could hire for a few francs per month a larger cell, a pistole. I took advantage of this for working hard upon my articles for the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Nineteenth Century. Now, the treatment we should have at Clairvaux was an open question. However, in France it is generally understood that, for political prisoners, the loss of liberty and the forced inactivity are in themselves so hard that there is no need to inflict additional hardships. Consequently, we were told that we should remain under the same regime that we had had at Lyons. We should have separate quarters, retain our own clothes, be free of compulsory work, and be allowed to smoke. “Those of you,” the governor said, “who wish to earn something by manual work will be enabled to do so by sewing stays or engraving small things in mother of pearl. This work is poorly paid; but you could not be employed in the prison workshops for the fabrication of iron beds, picture frames, and so on, because that would require your lodging with the common-law prisoners.” Like the other prisoners, we were allowed to buy from the prison canteen some additional food and a pint of claret every day, both being supplied at a very low price and of good quality.

The first impression which Clairvaux produced upon me was most favorable. We had been locked up and had been traveling all the day, from two or three o’clock in the morning, in those tiny cupboards into which the railway carriages used for the transportation of prisoners are usually divided. When we reached the central prison, we were taken temporarily to the penal quarters, and were introduced into extremely clean cells. Hot food, plain but excellent quality, had been served to us notwithstanding the late hour of the night, and we had been offered the opportunity of having a half-pint each of the very good vin du pays, which was sold at the prison canteen at the extremely modest price of twenty-four centimes (less than five cents) per quart. The governor and all the warders were most polite to us.

Next day the governor of the prison took me to see the rooms which he intended to give us, and when I remarked that they were all right, only a little too small for such a number⁠—we were twenty-two⁠—and that overcrowding might result in illness, he gave us another set of rooms in what had been in olden times the house of the superintendent of the abbey, and was now the hospital. Our windows looked down upon a little garden and off upon beautiful views of the surrounding country. In another room, on the same landing, old Blanqui had been kept the last three or four years before his release. Before that he was confined in one of the cells in the cellular house.

We obtained thus three spacious rooms, and a smaller room was spared for Gautier and myself, so that we could pursue our literary work. We probably owed this last favor to the intervention of a considerable number of English men of science, who, as soon as I was condemned, had signed a petition asking for my release. Many contributors to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Herbert Spencer, and Swinburne were among the signers, while Victor Hugo had added to his signature a few warm words. Altogether, public opinion in France received our condemnation very unfavorably; and when my wife had mentioned at Paris that I required books, the Academy of Sciences offered its library, and Ernest Renan, in a charming letter, put his private library at her service.

We had a small garden, where we could play ninepins or jeu de boules, and soon we managed to cultivate a narrow bed along the building’s wall, in which, on a surface of some eighty square yards, we grew almost incredible quantities of lettuce and radishes, as well as some flowers. I need not say that at once we organized classes, and during the three years that we remained at Clairvaux I gave my comrades lessons in cosmography, geometry, or physics, also aiding them in the study of languages. Nearly everyone learned at least one language⁠—English, German, Italian, or Spanish⁠—while a few learned two. We also managed to do some bookbinding, having learned how from one of those excellent Encyclopédie Roret booklets.

At the end of the first year, however, my health again gave way. Clairvaux is built on marshy ground, upon which malaria is endemic, and malaria, with scurvy, laid hold of me. Then my wife, who was studying at Paris, working in Würtz’s laboratory and preparing to take an examination for the degree of Doctor of Science, abandoned everything, and came to the tiny hamlet of Clairvaux, which consists of less than a dozen houses grouped at the foot of an immense high wall which encircles the prison. Of course, her life in that hamlet, with the prison wall opposite, was anything but gay; yet she stayed there till I was released. During the first year she was allowed to see me only once in two months, and all interviews were held in the presence of a warder, who sat between us. But when she settled at Clairvaux, declaring her firm intention to remain there, she was soon permitted to see me every day, in one of the small houses within the prison walls where a post of warders was kept, and food was brought me from the inn where she stayed. Later, we were even allowed to take a walk in the governor’s garden, closely watched all the time, and usually one of my comrades joined us in the walk.

I was quite astonished to discover that the central prison of Clairvaux had all the aspects of a small manufacturing town, surrounded by orchards and cornfields, all encircled by an outer wall. The fact is, that if in a French central prison the inmates are perhaps more dependent upon the fancies and caprices of the governor and the warders than they seem to be in English prisons, the treatment of the prisoners is far more humane than it is in the corresponding institutions on the other side of the Channel. The medieval revengeful system which still prevails in English prisons has been given up long since in France. The imprisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to prison he gets a decent bed, and retains it. He is not compelled, either, to degrading work, such as to climb a wheel, or to pick oakum; he is employed, on the contrary, in useful work, and this is why the Clairvaux prison has the aspect of a manufacturing town, iron furniture, picture frames, looking-glasses, metric measures, velvet, linen, ladies’ stays, small things in mother of pearl, wooden shoes, and so on, being made by the nearly sixteen hundred men who are kept there.

Moreover, if the punishment for insubordination is very cruel, there is, at least, none of the flogging which goes on still in English prisons. Such a punishment would be absolutely impossible in France. Altogether, the central prison at Clairvaux may be described as one of the best penal institutions in Europe. And, with all that, the results obtained at Clairvaux are as bad as in any of the prisons of the old type. “The watchword nowadays is that convicts are reformed in our prisons,” one of the members of the prison administration once said to me. “This is all nonsense, and I shall never be induced to tell such a lie.”

The pharmacy at Clairvaux was underneath the rooms which we occupied, and we occasionally had some contact with the prisoners who were employed in it. One of them was a gray-haired man in his fifties, who ended his term while we were there. It was touching to learn how he parted with the prison. He knew that in a few months or weeks he would be back, and begged the doctor to keep the place at the pharmacy open for him. This was not his first visit to Clairvaux, and he knew it would not be the last. When he was set free he had not a soul in the world to whom he might go to spend his old age. “Who will care to employ me?” he said. “And what trade have I? None! When I am out I must go to my old comrades; they, at least, will surely receive me as an old friend.” Then would come a glass too much of drink in their company, excited talk about some capital fun⁠—some “new stroke” to be made in the way of theft⁠—and, partly from weakness of will, partly to oblige his only friends, he would join in it, and would be locked up once more. So it had been several times before in his life. Two months passed, however, after his release, and he had not yet returned to Clairvaux. Then the prisoners, and the warders too, began to feel uneasy about him. “Has he had time to move to another judicial district, that he is not yet back?” “One can only hope that he has not been involved in some bad affair,” they would say, meaning something worse than theft. “That would be a pity: he was such a nice, quiet man.” But it soon appeared that the first supposition was the right one. Word came from another prison that the old man was locked up there, and was now endeavoring to be transferred to Clairvaux.

The old men were the most pitiful sight. Many of them had begun their prison experience in childhood or early youth; others at a riper age. But “once in prison, always in prison;” such is the saying derived from experience. And now, having reached or passed beyond the age of sixty, they knew that they must end their lives in prison. To quicken their departure from life the prison administration used to send them to the workshops where felt socks were made out of all sorts of woolen refuse. The dust in the workshop soon induced the consumption which released them. Then, four fellow prisoners would carry the old man to the common grave, the graveyard warder and his black dog being the only two beings to follow him; and while the prison priest marched in front of the procession mechanically reciting his prayer and looking at the chestnut or fir trees along the road, and the comrades carrying the coffin were enjoying the momentary freedom from confinement, the black dog would be the only being affected by the solemnity of the ceremony.