Showing posts from: November 2020
Recluse Deuces: Salinger and Pynchon, Two Modern Literary Outliers, Part II – TR Pynchon Jr
The second in our brace of reclusive authors of American fiction is Thomas Pynchon (see preceding blog on his the similarly publicity-shy JD Salinger). Long Island-born Pynchon came to the full-time vocation of fiction-writing via short stints in the navy and for Boeing as a technical aide. By the time Pynchon writes his first novel, V. in 1963, he is domiciled in México City, and the persona of Pynchon as an “Invisible Man of Letters” has already started to take root.
PYNCHON
If there were slim pickings for inquisitive fans of JD Salinger wanting more biographical information about their ‘fave’ reclusive writer, then comparatively there’s an absolute famine when it comes to the lack of ‘goss’ on Thomas Ruggles Pynchon! Pynchon has managed to weave an airtight web of mystery around his personal life – no interviews, no attendance of literary prize awards, no memoirs, no hobnobbing with fellow celebrities at ‘A’ list gatherings, no teaching post in academia. In Pynchon’s (loosely) historically-based novel Mason & Dixon one of the characters is castigated for “the least tolerable of Offences … the Crime they styl’d ‘Anonymity’” – the very state of existence that Pynchon craves. The reclusive and ubër-private New Yorker differs from the equally reclusive Salinger in not having had to suffer the ignominy of family ‘betrayal’ as Salinger was subjected to. Pynchon’s family (agent/wife, son, brother and sister) and friends have all closed ranks, drawing down the cone of silence on the subject of the famous recluse＊.
‘Mason & Dixon’
Pynchon very much belongs to the “why make it simple, when you can make it complicated” school of literary communication. His books, popularly subsumed under the labels ‘postmodern’ and metafiction are typically characterised by over-elaborate and often open-ended plots, dense and hard to follow, labyrinthine sentences (Mason & Dixon meanders a full 122 words before it reaches its first full stop on page 2!) Pynchon offers up a mixed grill of cultural references to sex, drug culture, science and tech stuff, historical info and comic-book fantasy (with a raft of quirky and zany characters), etc. Beginning with The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), the first of Pynchon’s “Californian trilogy” novels, the author turns a critical eye on the counterculture…although Pynchon evinces a consonance with its core values and communitarian ideals he voices a concern that the American counterculture may be an accessory of the dominant culture rather than a genuine reaction to it [‘American Modernity and Counterculture’, (The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon), www.litcharts .org]. In ‘Lot 49’ protagonist Oedipa Maas accidentally stumbles into Trystero, a shadowy world of convoluted conspiracies, unearthing a centuries-old conflict between rival mail distribution companies.
Political Pynchon? A central motif that comes through in Pynchon’s novels is a distrust bordering on paranoia of government agencies and private corporations. In Gravity’s Rainbow he expresses deep suspicions about the motives of the military/industrial complex. But Pynchon seems also to distrust the established political left in its empirical authoritarian form. Instead, his natural orientation and sympathies seem to be towards the anarchists and the preterites (ie, those controlled by the elite). One scholar notes that anarchists or allusions to them are present in all of the Pynchon books … anarchism, Pynchon seems to suggest, might be the best non-authoritarian and non-hierarchical social configuration for the future [‘Riding the Interface: An Anarchist Reading of Gravity’s Rainbow’, (Graham Benton), www.pynchonnotes.openlibhums.org]. Politics also run through Pynchon’s next, Vineland (1990), a novel which some dismissively dispatched as “Pynchon-Lite”. Vineland is an absurdist fable— punctuated with numerous references to drugs, 1960s music and TV pop culture, especially Star Wars—through which Pynchon provides a commentary on several key issues of the Eighties (the culture war debates, reading, television and mass communications). Set against the backdrop of the Republican Party’s re-election in 1984, Pynchon also takes a hefty swipe at American politics in the age of Reaganomics with a warning to America about “encroaching fascism” [Meinel, Tobias. “A Deculturated Pynchon? Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland” and Reading in the Age of Television.” Amerikastudien / American Studies 58, no. 3 (2013): 451-64. Accessed November 26, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43485900].
❝ Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it—dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—I don’t like the way it came out … someday, with the right man in the White House, there will be a Department of Jesus.❞
~ Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Guesting on ‘The Simpsons’
While resolutely keeping his guard up Pynchon maintains control of his world by choosing when and what of himself he gives up to the world at large. Famously Pynchon has appeared (in animated form) on two episodes of The Simpsons (a clear sign that the couch-surfing literary hermit is up on mainstream pop culture※), having dictated the terms of his guest spot. Obviously the idea of the Simpsons gig tickled his humerus wildly, as he is shown(sic) wearing a paper bag on his head and gets to say that he loves Marge Simpson’s book “almost as much as he loves cameras”.
Navy boy Tom
The “no selfies” author Tom Pynchon has been incredibly successful over many decades—especially living in a metropolis of over eight million people—in scrupulously avoiding the lenses of the ubiquitous paparazzi. Until fairly recently there was virtually no new photos of the reclusive writer floating round⍟. Media outlets when running a story on Pynchon almost invariably fall back on the one or two photos taken during his navy days (when Pynchon was aged around 19 or 20!). Pynchon’s legendary antipathy to having his photo taken has been explained away as self-consciousness about his protruding buck teeth (something that a sequence of sessions in the dentist’s chair early on could surely have fixed). Whether this explanation holds water or not is of course, like everything else, a topic Pynchon is deafeningly silent on. On the issue of Pynchon hermetically sealing himself off from the world, a more plausible speculation is that it may be a reflection of Pynchon’s disapproval of the modern trend of writers embracing, even rejoicing, in the role of being celebrities, eg, Norman Mailer and Truman Capote et al [‘Thomas Pynchon Returns to New York, Where He’s Always Been’, (J.K. Trotter), The Atlantic, 17-Jun-2013, www.theatlantic.com].
A method in the madness? The lengths Pynchon will go to avoid being photographed have a paranoia-like tinge to them, and some are legendary. Once in México during the Early Sixties V. period, when surprised by a random photographer, Pynchon apparently jumped straight out of his apartment window to escape being snapped [‘Hiding in Plain Sight: On the unobservable Thomas Pynchon’, (Alex Gilvarry), Topic, Issue No. 04, October 2027, www.topic.com]. The failure to pin down the identity of a famous but reclusive novelist contributes to the creation of myths … the enigma of an “invisible literary man” exudes more intrigue. Pynchon would understand that having a mystique about him, another layer of interest for his ‘gonzo’ fan base to engage with, would have a bonus marketable spin-off for the author’s sales [‘Meet Your Neighbor, Thomas Pynchon’, (Nancy Jo Sales), New York, 27-Jun-2008, www.nymag.com].
Pynchon Inc personnel: the ministry of silly names Pynchon novels are typically peopled by a vast array of (usually odd) characters. In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pychon rolls out no fewer than 400 named characters in 760 pages (most with fleeting walk-on, walk-off parts). Pynchon also revels in preposterous nomenclature, inventing lots of outrageous puns like Joaquin Stick, Benny Profane and the Marquis de Sod (a Californian lawn-care specialist!), and an inexhaustible supply of downright silly names – including McClintic Sphere, Tyrone Slothrop, Rachel Owlglass, Weed Atman, Yashmeen Halfcourt, Mike Fallopian, Scarsdale Vipe, Doc Sportello, Rev. Wicks Cherrycoke and Pig Bodine. Counterculture names abound – Zoyd, Frenesi, Prairie, etc. Needless to say from the jokey nature of this Pynchon nomen-sampler that fleshing out a character’s multi-layered depths is not really the New Yorker’s bag [‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
An orgy of exegesis: Conspiracy la-la land
As someone with a lofty literary profile in the US and beyond (regularly scores a mention in the mix of annual Nobel Prize contenders), the utter paucity of biographical information on Pynchon has given rise to some pretty wild speculation about who he really is? Outré theories abound on the internet about the novelist’s identity, one of the most persistent is that Thomas Pynchon is really JD Salinger! Presumably the germ of this notion was the commonalities between the two, both perceived as hermits with a pathological allergy to attention, and each shared a fierce insistence on their personal privacy. But what gave added weight to the imaginative coupling in people’s minds was Salinger’s early removal from the public gaze and the supposed drying up of his literary output as evidenced by the complete cessation of his published work post-1965. This baseless ‘theory’ holds that Salinger invented “Thomas Pynchon” as an “elaborate authorial personality” to hide behind (Trotter). Even more ludicrous was the allegation that Pynchon was in fact the Unabomber! Another speculation has him as an airline pilot in real life (motivated by Howard Hughes adulation perhaps?). Other theories, rather predictably, conclude that Pynchon has to be a drug smuggler or a CIA agent (“its all there in the stories!”) [‘Authors reveal their Thomas Pynchon conspiracy theories’, Bookish, 03-Oct-2013, www.usatoday.com]. And so it goes, with more and even crazier notions. There’s something very apt that so many loopy conspiracy theories circulate about the identity of an author whose fiction is littered with accounts of loopy conspiracy theories✫.
Footnote: Lost in Pynchon
Given my own often bewildered reaction to much of the fiction of Pynchon, and the palpable frustration that I see exhibited by others seeking despairingly to decode Tom Pynchon’s idiosyncratically personal brand of hieroglyphics◪, I often wonder why so many of us punters keep making the self-flagellating effort…I’m reminded of the cynic’s definition of a classic book, “something that everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read” (Mark Twain, who else?). Echoing this is one critic’s pithy summation of Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon’s most praised book, as the “least-read-must-read” book in American history (Sales). For the marginalised multitude denied enlightenment there is some comfort in mockery. The title of the 2009 “Po-Mo” take on TRP’s ‘gumshoe’ novel, Inherent Vice⍉, offers a pyrrhic get-square (‘Incoherent Vice’) [‘Incoherent Vice’, (Sam Anderson), New York, 31-Jul-2009, www.nymag.com]. 
PostScript: Absurdist and Fabulist? Pynchon is a black belt when it comes to telling the “shaggy-dog” story. Early critics described his novels V. and Gravity’s Rainbow as “high-caliber shaggy dog stories, full of digressions and possibly pointless details converging to a climax that revolves little” [‘Thomas Pynchon: A Primer’, (Jack Joslin), 25-Apr-2012, www.litreactor.com]. This description also applies to the later Mason & Dixon, a long rambling tale full of rollicking in taverns and absurdly inconsequential humour. Pynchon concocts a mixture of fact and fiction, the actual historical personages of Mason and Dixon blended into the “obvious lies, rumours and outright fantasies of their travels” while surveying the boundaries of colonial North America [Thomas Pynchon: Novels & Concept.” Study.com, 25 June 2013, study.com/academy/lesson/thomas-pynchon-novels-lesson-quiz.html]. This shaggy dog, picturesque style of Pynchon brings to mind Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, but more contemporaneously it reminds me of Peter Carey (especially Illywhacker) and John Barth (The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy) who both write in a Fabulist/Magic Realism vein.
＊ the scarcity of biographical material on Pynchon doesn’t stop the “Pynchon-curious” from trawling through the texts to turn up whatever “auto-fiction” they can find…the protagonist of V., Benny Profane, “a schlemihi and human yo-yo” is ex-navy, just like his creator
※ Pynchon, and for that matter, JD Salinger in his time, would undoubtedly have no trouble writing a treatise on daytime television had either wished to do so
⍟ even the photos supposed taken of the septuagenarian/octogenarian Pynchon out shopping can’t be confirmed as being genuinely of him
✫ Pynchon once famously said “every weirdo in the world is on my wavelength”
◪ one reviewer likened Pynchon’s cryptic first novel V. to a Hieronymus Bosch triptych
⍉ thus far the only Thomas Pynchon novel to make it to the silver screen
Recluse Deuces: Salinger and Pynchon, Two Modern Literary Outliers, Part I – JD Salinger
In the contemporary world of fiction-writing and publishing, maximising one’s media exposure in such a highly competitive market is considered essential for commercial success in the industry. A regime of TV talk shows, book tour circuits, getting your face out there, meeting and greeting the fans, is what authors do, its their bread and butter.
Two American novelists whose careers have followed an altogether different trajectory are JD Salinger and Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Junior. As modern writers of fiction, what Salinger and Pynchon have in common are a seemingly reclusive nature, or at the very least a pronounced aversion to publicity, or if you prefer to look at the obverse side, a fanatical even pathological commitment to guarding one’s own privacy from prying eyes.
SALINGER
❛What really knocks me out is a book that, when you’re all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.❜※
~ JD Salinger, Catcher in the Rye
꧁꧂ ꧁꧂ ꧁꧂
The ‘Catcher’: the unbearable heaviness of fame JD (Jerome David, but went by the name of Jerry) Salinger had a remarkably slim output for a literary career that spanned over half a century. Between 1965 and his death in 2010 Salinger published nothing at all, although he continued to write in this time, prolifically it seems⚀. 1951 was the seminal year for Salinger with the dazzling success of his debut novel, Catcher in the Rye…the story of teenager Holden Caulfield struck a profound chord with American adolescence, articulating a sense of angst and alienation from adult (mainstream) society. The ensuing torrent of fame, the intense media and fan preoccupation with the book and in its author, drove Salinger to ground, relocating for good to a rural retreat in Cornish, New Hampshire.
Salinger, in the words of the New York Times, “elevating privacy to an art form”, bunkered down, refused interviews, and clammed up about his personal life and past – leaving the press and other interested parties to try to piece together the autobiographical parts of the novelist’s existence. Some observers have speculated that Salinger experienced some sort of identity crisis or nervous breakdown after ‘Catcher’, that triggered his publicity-shyness. As a result of Catcher in the Rye’s impact Salinger thereafter set a determined course to studiously avoid future publication, including no follow-up novel to capitalise on the success✧. Eventually a handful of shorter works were published, the most significance of which was his 1961 novella/short story collection Franny and Zooey (adventures of the Glass family). On the dust jacket of that book Salinger wrote, “a writer’s feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years”… elsewhere he has spoken of “the joys of not publishing” [‘Salinger, Pynchon & Co.: When writers are recluses’, (Scott Timberg), LA Times, 02-Sep-2007, www.latimes.com].
Salinger troppo bizarro While Salinger kept schtum over the years, striving vigilantly to fend off unwanted attention, others within the author’s family and associates provided personal insights to whet the biography-starved appetites of the public. Both Salinger’s former live-in lover Joyce Maynard (who at 18 shacked up with the 50-something literary recluse in the New Hampshire hideaway) and the author’s own daughter Margaret wrote their own “tell-all”, unfavourable memoirs of Salinger (eg, “a scowling martinet who drank his own urine and clung to outmoded racial stereotypes drawn from old Hollywood movies”)¤ [Robert Schnakenberg, Secret Lives of Great Authors, (2008)]. Margaret’s hatchet-job on Dad provoked a sibling feud as Salinger’s son Matt (an occasional actor) rushed to his defence dissing Margaret’s memoir, Dream Catcher, as mere “gothic tales of our supposed childhood” [‘The odd life of Catcher in the Rye author JD Salinger’, (Martin Chilton), Independent, 01-Jan-2019, www.independent.co.uk].
A young Salinger (photo: AP)
Catcher in the Rye has consistently charted as a best-seller✪, but its critical reception has been controversial and reviews mixed. Some critics of the novel, taking a highbrow view (Joan Didion, George Steiner) have deemed it too pessimistic in its message, too obscene, sincere admittedly, but nonetheless mawkish. Other readers, more low-key in their response, have wondered what all the fuss was about [‘J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, Aging Gracelessly’, (Jonathan Yardley), The Washington Post, 19-Oct-2004, www.washingtonpost.com]. The ever-acerbic Gore Vidal questioned whether “Salinger’s enigmatic exile lent his work a seriousness it didn’t deserve” (Chilton). Salinger biographers Shields and Salerno saw ‘Catcher’ less as a coming-of-age story than allegorically as a “disguised war novel”◘ [‘Book Introduction to Salinger’, American Masters, 24-Dec-2013, www.pbs.org/].
A manifesto for the criminally unhinged A notorious side-effect of the public’s (or sections of it’s) infatuation with Catcher in the Rye is that it has been the motivational vade mecum of choice for some assassins (or would-be assassins) of celebrities. The novel had an inspirational role in the (separate) shootings of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s. Mark David Chapman (who murdered Lennon) and John Hinckley Jr (who shot Reagan) both over-identified with Holden Caulfield to the point of being delusional and both were found to be in possession of a copy of ‘Catcher’ at the times of their crime.
PostScript: How reclusive are these literary hermits? Salinger and Pynchon et al have been described as “recursively reclusive”, and this seems to be the majority opinion among fervent Salinger and Pynchon-watchers [‘The People Behind the Pen – T. Pynchon, J.D. Salinger and J.R.R. Tolkien’, Cision, 25-Sep-2015, www.prweb.com/]. But this view has been challenged – in Thomas Pynchon’s case, by himself! In 1997 Pynchon told CNN (by phone) that he believed that ‘recluse’ was “a code word generated by journalists … meaning, ‘doesn’t like to talk to reporters’” – the “media-shy recluse as an invention of the media” [“The endangered literary ‘recluse’”, (Brian Joseph Davis), The Globe and Mail, 07-Aug-2009, www.theglobeandmail.com]. But if Pynchon—dubbed by the US media as the “Invisible Man”—is a recluse and a hermit, he’s one who is hiding in plain sight, having lived for about 30 years in the same apartment (the precise address can be openly accessed by a simple online search) in the dense metropolis of New York City!
In regard to Salinger, Shields and Salerno contend that he was never actually a recluse – their evidence? While in Cornish, NH, he travelled, he had friends, family, relationships, he consumed the popular culture of his day, he expressed political opinions (not necessarily positive ones…Reagan was “the outgoing dummy” and George HW Bush was “the incoming dummy”)(Chilton). Another biographer, Paul Alexander, asserts that Salinger played up the role of loner, that he was originally quite a keen socialiser when he lived in NYC…and in “another life” in his youthful pre-literary career, ‘Jerry’ had been “entertainment director” for a cruise liner, making the fun happen for 1,500 passengers on MS Kungsholm! As has been noted, Salinger and Pynchon (and Harper Lee and others) are “not recluses in the true sense of the word … they simply have different ways of being public figures” (Davis).
※ Salinger’s words proved incredibly prescient in light of his own literary career
⚀ in 2019 Salinger’s son indicated that the family will release much of his father’s large body of unpublished work
✧ from the 1950s on Salinger also refused all offers to sell the film rights to ‘Catcher’, backing it up with a ready willingness to sue in any instance of unauthorised use of his creations
¤ other allegations of ‘oddball’ behaviour directed at Salinger include his practice of glossolalia, his use of an orgasmatron, his dabbling in Scientology (and Vedantaism) and embrace of extreme homeopathy (Schnakenberg)
✪ to date the novel has sold somewhere in the vicinity of 70 million copies worldwide
◘ Salinger was a WWII veteran (active in D-Day, Dachau), had PTSD; postwar he was “perpetually in search of a spiritual cure for his damaged psyche” (Shields & Salerno)
Brickfield Hill: From ‘Brickopolis‘ to Centre of a Sydney Retailing Dynasty
Sydney is chock full of locality names—names like Taverners Hill, Clifton Gardens, Pearces Corner, Tom Ugly’s Point, Russell Lea, Camp Cove, Tumble Down Dick, Bushrangers Hill, Brush Farm, Strawberry Hills, Charing Cross, etc—places on or off the map not big enough or important enough to warrant the status of ‘suburb’ in their own right.
‘Plan de la Ville de Sydney’ (Lesueur’s Map, 1802) (Source: State Library, NSW)
One of the earliest in the Sydney colony with an interesting back story is Brickfield Hill. Located on indigenous Gadigal country at the south end of the CBD, Brickfield Hill is a loosely-demarcated area❋ with a small hill, the place where the early colony’s clay was sourced for the making of bricks and tiles…bricks plus a hill, hence the name “Brickfield Hill”. This endeavour started virtually from year one of the European takeover of the Great South Land…the First Fleet in 1788 included convicts with brick-making experience – James Bloodworth, the most significant of them was to prove invaluable to the embryonic settlement’s progress. With only makeshift accommodation in the form of canvas tents, the construction of more secure and permanent housing was of the highest priority. Bloodworth was immediately appointed master brick-maker for the Port Jackson colony by Governor Phillip, assigned labourers and tasked with the job of manufacturing 30,000 tiles per month [Ringer, Ron, Bricks, Dictionary of Sydney, 2008, http://dictionary of Sydney.org/entry/bricks, viewed 19 Nov 2020 ; ‘Brickfield Hill’, www.kathyprokhovik.com), 06-May-2018].
The public brickfield on the ‘Hill’ became such a hub of activity that in 1799 it was described as “a suburb of the town of Sydney … within a few yards of the main road” (George Street) [‘Bricks and Nails: Building Materials as Criteria for Dating in Sydney and Environs from 1788’, Robert Victor Johannes Varman, (Unpublished PhD thesis from the University of Sydney, Sept. 1993), www.ses.library.usyd.edu.au].
Brickfield Hill, George Street (Photo: JR Clarke / State Library, NSW)
By 1804 there were 72 houses within the village of Brickfield Hill, but it wasn’t the most salubrious part of Sydney to live…that part of George Street was “infamous for its steep, dangerous and dusty road” (Varman). The “exceedingly unpleasant” place, “covered by a filthy brown haze and choking dust storms of windy days” the southerlies that swept along the street were given the name the ‘Brickfielder’ [“Brickaholic’s tales behind the history of Sydney’s ‘golden mile’”, (John Huxley), Sydney Morning Herald, 26-Sep-2008, www.smh.com.au]. By 1840 the public brickfields had become a blot on the landscape…the dusty brick pits and polluting kilns were not conducive to the increasing residential composition of the village. Its dingy, seedy taverns were dens of crime and rampant practices of bestial cruelty. In 1841 the government ended the brick industry in the locality. In it’s place small brick-making concerns in private hands fanned out in directions south and west to suburbs such as Newtown, Camperdown, Pyrmont, Glebe and to St Peters which eventually emerged as the premier site for brick-making in Sydney. Merchant stores, warehouses and more housing (leading to slum conditions) helped fill the void in Brickfield Hill (Varman).
(Source: SL – NSW)
Gradient was a sizeable issue in Brickfield Hill in the early period … the steeply sloping terrain along that section of George Street impeded the transport of heavily-laden carts. During the 1830s the authorities finally addressed this. A colonial earth-moving project succeeded in reducing the gradient between Bathurst and Liverpool Streets to a more gradual and manageable slope [‘Brickfield Hill (1) – The Hill’, Sydney Eye, www.sydneyeye.blogspot.com/].
At the beginning of the 20th century Brickfield Hill achieved the kudos of an altogether different association as the new home of one of Sydney’s early retail giants. In 1905 Anthony Hordern and Sons opened its “Palace Emporium” on the site, their mega-department store rose up on the ‘Hill’ – six stories high and comprising 21 hectares of retail space. At its zenith Hordern’s Brickfield Hill emporium was reputedly the largest department store in the world. [‘Brickfield Hill’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
In its post-department store life the Hordern building’s vast “rabbit-warren” network of rooms and corridors was home to the Business School of the NSW Institute of Technology until the 1980s. Acquired by Malaysian property developer Ipoh Garden Development in 1985, it was demolished the following year amid considerable controversy to make way for the World Square complex⍉ [‘Anthony Hordern & Sons’, www.wikiwand.com].
With the leveling of Hordern’s Palace Emporium building and the earlier closure of the Brickfield Hill post office, Brickfield Hill’s long existence as an identifiable locality in Sydney’s CBD was consigned to the past.
PostScript: The Hordern story From humble beginnings as a King Street (Sydney) drapery shop in 1823, Hordern and Sons built up an Australian retail empire. After a stint in Melbourne retailing, Anthony Hordern (Senior) built his first Sydney emporium in Chinatown (Haymarket). The AH showcase, opened in 1905 to replace the fire-destroyed Haymarket emporium, was the new Palace Emporium (AKA the “Senior Store”). The Brickfield Hill retail ”super-store“—with a main entrance of imported Italian marble—later diversified its commercial activities to include a branch of the Commonwealth Bank, tea rooms, a post and parcel office, rest rooms, public phone booths and a Thomas Cook travel agency. Expansion of the business occurred from the Fifties with new Hordern & Sons stores opening in Canberra, Wollongong, West Ryde and Mid-City Pitt Street. By the late 1960s Anthony Hordern & Sons was massively losing business to suburban malls and to city competitors…it’s retail empire crumbling, the Brickfield Hill flagship was acquired by Waltons Ltd. In early 1973 the doors of the iconic retailer, once lauded as a “colossal business premises”, closed for good. (Wikiwand entry).
🔽 (Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection. Sydney Living Museums. [TC 658.871 HOR/54]) 
✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠✠
❋ roughly covering the area from Sydney Town Hall (Bathurst Street) to Central Station, skirting the present-day locales and suburbs of Haymarket and Surry Hills
⍉ which then stayed as a gigantic hole In the ground for 18 years until World Square was completed in 2004
⊰⊱⊰⊱⊰⊱
Transient Small ‘e’ empires in the Americas: The Méxican Experiment 2
Forty years on from the Emperor Agustín episode (see preceding post), México experienced a brief imperial phase for the second time. The Second Méxican empire differed from the first in being the creation of an externally-imposed political intervention. Born out of the ambitions, dreams and adventurist tendencies of the French emperor Napoleon III, the foreign intervention resulted in a hand-picked member of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg dynasty being elevated to a “prefabricated throne” in México [Hanna, Kathryn Abbey. “The Roles of the South in the French Intervention in Mexico.” The Journal of Southern History 20, no. 1 (1954): 3-21. Accessed November 17, 2020. doi:10.2307/2954576.].
The trigger that set off the chain of events which resulted in an otherwise undistinguished Austrian archduke sitting atop an empire in faraway México was an economic crisis plaguing the Second Méxican republic in 1861. The Juarez government owed huge sums of money to foreign creditors—in particularly to France but also to other European states—which it was either unable or unwilling to repay, eventually the regime reneged on its debts. France’s Napoleon III entered into a conspiracy with México’s rich landowning class, to subvert the Juarez regime. With back-up from Britain and Spain (also creditors of the regime), the French landed a force at the port of Veracruz and demanded that Méxican government meet its financial obligations to Europe. After an initial military setback in the Battle of Puebla※, the French army eventually captured México City. The French military intervention further inflamed a civil war already in train between the conservative and liberal forces of México [‘The Emperor Maximilian arrives in Mexico City’, (Richard Cavendish), History Today, 06-Jun-2014, www.historytoday.com].
Napoleon’s empire of opportunism
Napoleon’s foray into México was not just about the recovery of international debts, some historians contend that it had a longer strategic intent, a grandiose plan to fuel the emperor’s imperialistic designs, known as la Grande Pensée (lit: “the big thought”). Having established a protectorate over the country Napoleon’s immediate objective was to create a buffer against US expansionism, which he thought could be realised by turning México into a pliant imperial ally…amounting to the creation of “a new order” in the region , one to Napoleon’s liking. This view purports that the French emperor sought to forge a “Latin, Catholic bloc” to counter any likely further US encroachment on the central and southern parts of the continent (see more on this in Footnote)◇ [Michele Cunningham, ‘México and the Foreign Policy of Napoleon III’, (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Adelaide, December 1996]. The timing had been right, all of America’s energies were directed towards the civil war renting the union asunder, preventing Washington from taking a robust response to the European incursion in its sphere of influence⌽.
Maximilian’s reluctance to play an obliging puppet role
To head the imperial construct, Ferdinand Maximilian, younger brother of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor (Franz Josef) was chosen. Maximilian was initially loathe to take on the job, he only did so after encouragement from his ambitious wife (Carlota) and after some deception on the part of the French (a phoney plebiscite was rigged to convey the impression that the Méxican people were willing to accept an Imperio Mexicano with Maximilian as emperor). Maximilian eventually warmed to the imperial role but he proved less amenable to the conservative program espoused by his backers than they had anticipated. Seeing himself as the protector of the peasantry, Maximilian endorsed wide-reaching reforms (including abolition of serfdom and child labour) and refused to restore the powerful Catholic Church to the privileged position it held prior to Juarez’s attack on its assets (Cavendish)⌑. The loss of Catholic hierarchy support didn’t help Maximilian’s prospects of surviving when things got tight politically for him in México later on.
Castillo de Chapultepec, Maximilian & Carlota’s official imperial residence, CDMX (Photo: www.mexicanroutes.com) ⍒
Confederate exile plan
Maximilian’s empire, even with its heavy reliance on French support, struggled to bend all of the internal opposition to its rule⦿. Maximilian and his French backers duly forged alliances with the American South, Confederate generals Magruder and Preston were appointed envoys to México City. The door to México was opened to Confederates…settler schemes, the brainchild of southern oceanography pioneer Matthew F Maury, were launched (New Virginia Colony/Carlota Colony) to encourage postwar migration (asylum) south of the border. Maury’s colonisation scheme was intended to bring 200,000 southerners to Méxican plantations with former slaves as ‘apprentices’, however the plan never really took off. México’s long-standing ban on slavery was a further disincentive for prospective Confederate settlers (Hanna).
French end-game
As things transpired Napoleon (and Maximilian) gambled on the wrong side in the American Civil War. The Union’s emergence from the civil war triumphant was lethal for French ambitions in México, Washington was now free to turn its attention to the foreign interloper. Invoking the Monroe Doctrine of Manifest Destiny, the US “hard-balled” France into removing its troops from México. Other urgencies closer to home were also a factor in Napoleon‘s exit from México – primarily the menace of a rising Prussia. The French departure also sealed the fate of the foreign emperor they had placed on the throne. In 1867 with dwindling support for the Méxican empire, Maximilian was comprehensively defeated by the republican forces, captured and like his monarchical Méxican predecessor Agustín I, executed by firing squad.
Footnote: A rationale for French imperial reach into México and l’Amérique latine
At the time of Napoleon’s Méxican adventurism there was a widespread undercurrent of ”Pan-Latinism” in the air. The Napoleonic foreign policy that propelled France into the midst of an internal conflict in México has its rationale in the thinking of political economist of the day, Michel Chevalier. His influential ideas about Pan-Latinism struck a particular chord in France. Chevalier developed the idea that France (as leader of the Latin language countries) had a special hegemonic role to fulfil among les races Latines (the “Latin races”(sic)) vis-a-vís the Anglo-Saxon world. In the New World this manifested itself in the idea of France taking the lead in Hispanic America as a bulwark against the US expansionist juggernaut. Specifically, this meant France intervening in México to stabilise the unstable Méxican government—providing “a strong barrier on the Rio Grande to impede the march of Anglo-Saxonism”—and thus resisting Yankee territorial expansion which would undermine the solidarity of Catholic l’Amérique latine❂. And, as alluded to above, for Napoleon of course, the structure of empire was deemed the best framework to glue the various parts of the territorial entity together. A bonus incentive for France to establish a foothold in the Americas would be a chance to share in the continent’s vast riches◇[‘Pan-latinism, French intervention in México (1861-1867) and The Genesis of the idea of Latin America’, (John Leddy Phelan), (reproduced in Historical Digital), www.historicas.unam.mx].
◙◙◙ Maximilian I, first and last Habsburg Emperor of México, 1864–1867
ㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎㅎ
※ commemorated by Méxicans annually on “Cinco de Mayo” (5th of May)
⌑ one of the stratagems ultilised by Maximilian to try to make himself more appealing to Méxicans was to formally adopt the two grandsons of the first Méxican emperor, Agustín de Iturbide
⌽ practical assistance by the Americans to the republican side during the civil war was largely restricted to ‘losing’ caches of weapons over the border
⦿ Emperor Maximilian was probably aware of the downside of over-association with France – French diplomats sent to México City had an unfortunate tendency to make zero effort to disguise their distain for Méxicans, engendering an understandable reciprocal feeling of antipathy on the Méxicans’ part [Barker, Nancy N. “Monarchy in Mexico: Harebrained Scheme or Well-considered Prospect?” The Journal of Modern History 48, no. 1 (1976): 51-68. Accessed November 16, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877749].
❂ both the French and the Méxicans viewed the prospect of further territorial grabs by the Americans as pretty much inevitable
◇ France had already signalled its interest in the lucrative Sonora silver mines in northern México
Transient Small ‘e’ empires in the Americas: The Méxican Experiment 1
During the first half-century of México’s independence, having freed itself from the Spanish Empire in 1821, the country was subjected to two brief periods of monarchical rule. The two emperadores de México, whose reigns were separated by 40 years, were elevated to the Méxican throne through very different circumstances, though ultimately they both met the same fate.
The first emperor, Agustín de Iturbide, was a Méxican caudillo (military chieftain) who after initially supporting Spain in the Méxican war for independence, switched sides, allying with the radical insurgents and took command of the independence movement. Iturbide formulated the Iguala Plan which called for an independent México to be ruled by a prince from the (Spanish) Bourbon house (or failing that, a Méxican one), with equal rights for creoles (mixed race citizens) and peninsulares (of Spanish ancestry born in either Spain or México). The Plan, also advocating the retention of all powers for the army and the exclusivity of the Roman Catholic Church, won a consensus of approval within Méxican society. The viceroy of New Spain, with a new liberal government in charge in Spain, acquiesced to the Plan (Treaty of Córdoba), and Iturbide, basking in the glory of his role of El Libertador de la Nueva España took the helm of the new state.
(Image: www.onthisday.com)
Road to empire Iturbide initially became the president of the governing Council of Regents. By May 1822, having several times previously declined appeals by the populace at large❋ to become emperor of México, Iturbide finally concurred and was crowned as Agustín the First in July. The empire of New Spain which fell to Iturbide certainly warranted the imperial tag, comprising an area of “Greater México” which included, in addition to modern-day México, the areas of Alto California right up to the Oregon territory, Arizona, New México, Utah, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, plus all of lower Meso-America down to Panama.
Mismanaging the finances Within a few months things in Agustín’s empire had started to go badly “pear-shaped” and the image of Iturbide who had led the country to an almost bloodless war of independence was receding in peoples’ minds. Despite the country’s shaky financial situation the Agustín administration overspent catastrophically – a cost blowout of more than 25,000 pesos a month, nearly five times that of the New Spain Viceroyalty. Equally scandalously, the extravagance and imperial pomp of Agustín’s court drew widespread criticism and fostered republican sentiment at a time when ordinary Méxicans were bearing the brunt of salary cuts and newly imposed taxes [Anna, Timothy E. “The Rule of Agustin De Iturbide: A Reappraisal.” Journal of Latin American Studies 17, no. 1 (1985): 79-110. Accessed November 13, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/157498]. In addition, Agustín increasingly couldn’t afford to pay the army (his power base) which to was prove critical to the chances of his own political longevity.
México, 1825 (image: Library of Congress (US)
Emperor v Congress From the onset of the empire Agustín was at loggerheads with an increasingly hostile Congress, eventually resulting in a more authoritarian response by the ruler…press freedoms were curtailed, an alleged conspiracy within the parliament gave Iturbide a pretext to jail republican member, suspend Congress and replace it with a 45 man-junta. Key sections of the army deserted the emperor in 1823 including his most trusted generals. Other leading army generals, Santa Anna and Victoria, declared the Casa Mata Plan, calling for Agustín’s ouster and the installation of a republican form of government✫. Finding his position untenable Agustín abdicated in March 1823 and sought exile in Europe. Unaware that Congress had sentenced him to death in absentia, Iturbide returned to México in 1824 and was arrested and promptly executed. Iturbine’s constitutional monarchy was replaced with a federalist structure along US lines—de Los Estados Unidos Méxicanos, the ‘USM’—a constitution giving more power to the legislative branch than to the executive.
PostScript: Agustín the ‘Unpraised’ Historians on the whole have tended to give Iturbide rather short shrift, especially when compared to the other, lavishly acknowledged, great liberadores of Spanish American history such as Bolivár and San Martin. Many seem have taken a leaf from the book of Iturbide’s contemporaries who unrestrainedly vilified him, eg. the opposition El Sol Méxican newspaper who labelled the emperor “a traitor, a hypocrite and an impious man” (30th April 1823)✪, “betraying his patria (homeland) for personal wealth and tyrannical power” [Review, Timothy E. Anna, The Mexican Empire of Iturbide, (1990), Michael P. Costeloe, (Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2009, www.cambridgeunivesitypress.org/].
(attributed: JA Huerta)
Historian TE Anna proffered a fresh reappraisal of the embattled first emperor of México three decades ago in an attempt to give some balance. On the charge that Iturbide usurped power for himself, while conceding there were lingering questions of legality about his accession to the throne—Congress lacked the required quorum to ratify the move—Anna nonetheless contends that there was no substantial nationwide opposition to the imperial elevation at the time. Anna also evidences Iturbide’s reluctance to assume the title of emperor, noting that it was only at the urging of others that he eventually took the job. Moreover he affirms that the consensus in favour of Iturbide reflected the existence of a “cult of Iturbide”, a genuine and spontaneous groundswell of popular support that was “not manufactured by the Hero himself”. On the question of why did Iturbide, having already consolidated power in his hands, go the emperor route, Anna argues that there was very few voices raised against the establishment of a monarchy in 1822 (mainly Fray de Mier and El Sol)…and that Méxicans, after centuries of rule by the Spanish viceroys, were accustomed to an imperial form of government▣. Anna also addresses why Agustín made the decision to abdicate, concluding that he “gave up because the political price of remaining on the throne was more than he would pay”. To continue as emperor, Anna argues, Iturbide recoiled from the grim prospect of having his power emasculated… conceding sovereignty to Congress meant imperilling the planks of his cherished Iguala Plan (Anna).
__________________________________________
❋ excluding republicans
✫ Santa Anna’s other co-conspirators against Agustín were generals Guerrero and Echàverri
✪ Other pejorative adjectives heaped on Agustín include ‘fraud’, ‘usurper’, ‘dictator’…his decriers have even described him as “México’s most significant non-person” [Anna Macias, TIMOTHY E. ANNA. The Mexican Empire of Iturbide. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. 1990. Pp. xii, 286. The American Historical Review, Volume 96, Issue 2, April 1991, Pages 642–643, http://doi.org/10.1086/age/96.2.642-a]
▣ conversely the republican form of rule was still not very well understood at the time, even by its advocates
✦ Anna’s basic thesis seems to be that at heart Iturbide wanted the Méxican regime to be a constitutional monarchy but was thwarted by enemies in and outside of Congress (Macias)
Retribution, Incapacitation, Deterrence, Rehabilitation? The French Carceral Presence in Colonial Africa and Indochina
France’s 19th century colonial empire (sometimes called the “second French colonial empire”) properly dates from the French invasion and eventual conquest of Algeria, 1830-47) [‘French Colonial Empires’, The Latin Library, www.thelatinlibrary.com]. Following the failed 1848 Revolution—the Parisian uprising having been quashed by General Cavaignac—just 468 political prisoners were transported to Algeria, an initial, modest number which grew exponentially after Louis-Napoleon’s 1851 palace coup. Thousands of dissidents ended up detained in prisons and forts in Algeria’s and Bône (Annaba) [Sylvie Thénault. Algeria: On the Margins of French Punitive Space?. 2015. HAL Id: hal-02356523 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02356523] Translator: Christopher Mobley, web.colonialvoyages.org].
(Credit: ‘The Algerian Story’)
Bagnes d’Afrique◇
The system in French colonial Algeria worked thus: the worst politicals were kept in confinement, the rest were despatched to depot camps, these were disciplinary’ camps where the convicts were consigned to terracing and irrigation projects, building ports, fortifications and roads, working in mines and quarries, or to colony camps which were mobile building sites – mainly assigned to rural areas, notably to clear land. Convicts were subjected to “hard labour at exhausting pace in a naturally trying environment”※. Convicts singled out for punishment in the Algerian penal system were not treated with lenience. Violence perpetrated against them included ingeniously devilish variations on the infliction of pain and rigid constraint in confined spaces (Thénault).
(Image: www.timetoast.com)Deportation, Algeria to Guyane and Nouvelle Calédonie Residents of the colony committing offences against the law in French Algeria (which applied the same penal code as in Metropolitan France), could and were sentenced to relégation (exile) to other colonies in the empire⍟. A number of the convicted in Algeria ended up in French Guiana and New Caledonia, sentenced to harsh work regimes. Some deportés to Cayenne (Guiana) who escaped penal servitude there, found their way back to Algeria and a resumption of their outlaw activism. This contrasted with New Caledonia where some of the Algerian exiles were able to form ties with the Caldoche, especially the transported Communards, and settle permanently in New Caledonia after serving their terms (Thénault).
The three-way movement of convicted insurrectionists—from metropole to colony, from colony to metropole, and from colony to colony—was part of a deliberate policy by France. It’s purpose was to move insurgents “from environments where they were troublesome and render them useful somewhere else”⍉ (see also PostScript). As Delnore notes, within several years, as needs changed, deportation “became formalised and largely unidirectional”. With not enough free settlers from the parent country willing to live in Algeria, increasing the deportees from France obviously numerically enhanced the overall French presence in the colony while providing cheap labour [Delnore, Allyson Jaye. “Empire by Example?: Deportees in France and Algeria and the Re-Making of a Modern Empire, 1846–1854.” French Politics, Culture & Society 33, no. 1 (2015): 33-54. Accessed November 9, 2020. http://jstor.org/stable/26378216].
The Indochine ‘bastille’ The French republic established and consolidated its colonial hold over the land of ‘Vietnam’ (then comprising three sectors, Tonkin – northern Vietnam, Annam – central Vietnam and Cochinchina (southern Vietnam, Cambodia), and gradually established a penitentiary system. In the south this included the Côn Dào islands (near Saigon), also known as the Poulo Condor(e) islands, a prison colony from 1862 to 1975. The first Con Dao prison (Phu Hai) on Con Son island was built in 1862 to house both political dissidents from Vietnam and Cambodia. Plantations and quarries were set up to utilise the labour of the growing prison population. According to Peter Zinoman, almost all senior Vietnamese communist leaders except Ho Chi Minh spent time in one of the Con Dao pénitentiaires. Corruption and opium addiction was rampant within the prison staff and inmates. The Con Dao prison colonies were taken over by the South Vietnamese government in 1954 and closed in 1975 after the communist victory [‘Con Dao: Vietnam’s Prison Paradise’, (Peter Ford), The Diplomat, 08-Mar-2018, web.thediplomat.com].
The most famous French prison in the northern section of the country (Tonkin) was Hỏ Lò penal colony in Hanoi (commonly translated as “fiery furnace” or “Hell’s hole”), the French called it La Maison Centrale. It was built in the 1880s to hold Vietnamese political prisoners opposing the French colonists. During the Vietnam War, with tables turned, it was used to incarcerate American POWs who sarcastically referred to it as the “Hanoi Hilton”. Today it is a museum dedicated to the Vietnamese revolutionaries who were held in its cells, complete with an old French guillotine (the American section is a more sanitised part of the memorial bereft of any references to torture) [‘Inside the Hanoi Hilton, North Vietnam’s Torture Chamber For American POWs’, (Hannah McKennett), ATI, 08-Oct-2019, www.allthatsinteresting.com].
In the Annam (central highlands) part of Indochina, the Buon Ma Thuot penitentiary was yet another of the French colonialists’ special jails with a “hell on earth” reputation, built for Vietnamese political prisoners. Buon Ma Thuot was located in a remote, hard-to-access area encircled by near-impenetrable jungle and inflicted with malarial water. The penal colony was also seen as something of a training school for Vietnamese patriots, many of the revolutionaries who took part in the August Revolution (1945) in Dak Lak against the French were at one time incarcerated here [‘Buon Ma Thuot Prison’, http:en.skydoor.net/].
Punitive over the disciplinary approach The prison system in Indochine française did not “deploy disciplinary practices (such as the installation of) cellular and panoptic architecture”. Prisoners were housed in “undifferentiated⊞, overcrowded and unlit communal rooms”. “Disciplinary power” (in the Foucauldian sense) was not implemented in the Indochinese prisons…the coercion and mandatory labour dealt out was not aimed at rehabilitating or modifying or reforming the behaviour or character of inmates. Zinoman accounts for the discrepancy as an inability of colonial prison practice to adopt the prescribed theory of modern, metropolitan prison technologies at the time…this applied to French Indochina as equally it did to French Guiana (blight of bad record-keeping, incompetence management, personnel indiscipline/corruption), but he evidences other factors peculiar to Indochina – the persistence of local pre-colonial carceral traditions, the legacy of imperial conquest and the effects of colonial racism (“yellow criminality”) [Peter Zinoman, The Colonial Bastille: A History of Imprisonment in Vietnam 1862-1940, (2001)].
Endnote: Deportation v Transportation? These two terms in relation to penal colonies tend to be used interchangeably. In regard to France, after 1854 the authorities made a semantic distinction between common law prisoners who were described as being ‘transported’ (the term borrowed from the British carceral usage), and political prisoners who were said to be ‘deported’ – in some cases to the same colonies (Delnore).
(‘Prisoners Exercising’ VW Van Gogh)
PostScript:Theory applied to the French imperial colony French lawmakers and penologists in the 19th century tended to juggle two distinct but related rationales or approaches to the practice of deportation. One view, the penal colony as terre salvatrice (lit: “saving land”), held that deportation, having removed criminals from the “corrupting environment”, would through the discipline of hard work have a redemptive and healthy effect on them and permit their reintegration into French society. The second saw transportation to the overseas penitentiaire as the means for extracting the criminal element out of the ‘civilised’ society of the metropole, “separating France’s troublemakers from the rest of the population” (Delnore).
◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸◂▸
◇ Algeria was the main African country where French penitentiaries were established but not the only one. France had other, smaller penal colonies on the continent, such as in Obock (in modern Djibouti) and in Gabon
※ other convicts were assigned to individual settlers and entrepreneurs to work mainly on private farms
⍟ some Muslim Algerians convicted in the colony were also sent to southern France and held under “administrative internment” – in part under the belief that incarcerating them in a Christian country might have a greater punitive impact on these criminals (Thénault)
⍉ there were French precedents for this – in 1800 Napoleon I deported Jacobin opponents to the Seychelles, and around the same time removed Black mutineers from French colonies in the West Indies and imprisoned them in mainland France and on Corsica (Delnore)
⊞ where both the accused and the convicted prisoners are indiscriminately detained together
⍒⍋⍒ ⍋
French Guiana and Devil’s Island – Bagne le plus diabolique
France’s penal colony network in New Caledonia (see preceding post) was not exactly a summer camp for delinquents, it was a brutal, unforgiving and unrelenting environment for existing rather than living. Comparatively though, it pales into lesser significant when stacked up against the unimaginable inferno of its South American equivalent in the colonies pénitentiaires of Guyane française.
The Napoleonic manoeuvre In 1851 Napoleon’s nephew Louis-Napoleon, elected president of the French Republic, staged a coup from above. With army backing he neutralised the national parliament and enacted a new constitution giving himself sweeping new dictatorial powers, a decisive step on the road to emulating his uncle by declaring himself emperor, Napoleon III, in 1852. With France’s jails and hulks overflowing with the incarcerated multitudes, swollen further by the emperor’s defeated opponents, much of the surplus prison population was transported to France’s Algerian colony. At the same time Louis-Napoleon took the opportunity to establish a new penal colony in French Guiana and send out the first lot of transportés. Transportation to penal colonies, especially to Guyane, to New Caledonia and to Algeria, allowed France to rid itself of dangerous and incorrigible offenders at home, and to punish them for their sins by subjecting them to a life of hard labour❋ [Jean-Lucien Sanchez. ‘The French Empire, 1542–1976’. Clare Anderson. A Global History of Convicts and Penal Colonies, Bloomsbury, 2018. hal-01813392. HAL Id: hal-01813392].
Economies of labour Aside from cleansing France of the criminal element, transportation served another purpose for Napoleon III. Slavery had been the engine of growth for France’s colonial empire, but France’s abolition of the institution in 1848 resulted in a massive shortage of cheap labour. Turning French Guiana (FG) and other French colonies into penitentiaries—replacing the lost plantation workers, the freed black African slaves (known as Maroons) with convicts in FG—neatly solved the problem [‘France’s “dry guillotine” a hell on earth for convicts’, (Marea Donnelly), Daily Telegraph, 22-Aug-2018, www.dailytelegraph.com.au].
Bagne le plus diabolique The penal system in Guyane française revolved around two principal locations⧆, one was the Prison of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni which functioned as the destination of first arrival for transportés (and usually only a temporary home for the majority). From here, the worst of the bagnards (convicts), the recaptured escapees and the relégués (recidivists), were relocated down the coast to the other Guyane penitentiary, Bagne de Cayenne. Here, a small group of off-shore islands, Îles du Salut (Salvation Islands) comprised the penal colony on which French Guiana’s dark reputation hangs. Better known as Devil’s Island, a collective descriptor for three distinct islands, the farthest away and most inaccessible of which, Île du Diable, was reserved for a select group of prisoners⦿.
(Image: www.thevintagenews.com)
The history of Devil’s Island is one of notoriety and longevity (operating from 1852 to 1946). Conditions for inmates were horrendous… hard labour from six in the morning to six at night (including being assigned to endlessly building roads that were never intended to be finished); working and living in a malarial coast and tropical jungle environment; susceptibility to a host of diseases including yellow fever, typhus, cholera and malaria; the more dangerous prisoners solitarily confined to tiny cells 1.8m x 2m indefinitely, and often exposed to the elements [‘French Guiana Prison That Inspired “Papillon”, (Karin-Marijke Vis), Atlas Obscura, 11-Aug-2015, www.atlasobscura.com].
Île du Diablo (Photo: Romain Veillon / www.thespaces.com)
A tropical death camp A sense of mortality in the penal colony was ever-present – convicts fought and murdered each other, punishment by execution (by guillotine) was regularly meted out❂. For those who could no longer stand the psychological and physical torture of incarceration in such a sub-human hell hole, driven to near-insanity, the urge to escape (“Chercher la belle”) exerted a powerful pull. This however was virtually a suicidal course of action as would-be escapees faced shark-infested waters and jungles teeming with jaguars, snakes and other deadly beasts [‘The story of the world’s most infamous penal system – ever?’, (Robert Walsh), History is Now Magazine, www.historyisnowmagazine.com]. In the first 14 years of the Guyane prisons’ operation, two-thirds of the convicts perished (Sanchez) At its worst point Devil’s Island had a 75% death-rate.
The sentencing regime was particularly harsh…bagnards transported to FG were subjected to the penalty of ‘doubleage’. This meant that on the expiration of a prisoner’s sentence, he or she✦ had to remain working in the colony for an additional period that was equivalent to the original sentence. And if prisoners were sentenced to terms of more than eight years, this automatically became a life sentence (Donnelly).
⌂ the Dreyfus Tower
Dreyfus Affair puts the spotlight on Devil’s Island Among the over 52,000 déportés sent to Devil’s Island/Cayenne from its inception to 1936, its most famous inmate was Alfred Dreyfus, who had been wrongful arrested on a trumped-up charge of selling military secrets to Germany. Dreyfus endured over fours years on solitary Île du Diable before his case became a cause célèbre taken up by prominent citizens like novelist Emile Zola. Protests forced the French government—in a convoluted set of developments—to reopen Dreyfus’ case, retry him, re-convict him then free him and eventually exonerate him. The Dreyfus affair exposed entrenched anti-Semitism in the French military and in society [‘Devil’s Island Prison History and Facts’, Prison History, www.prisonhistory.net/].
⌂ the Devil’s Island story became widely known after ex-inmate Henri Charriere’s published account of his escape, ‘Papillon’, was made into a Hollywood movie in the early 70s
An anachronism of incarceration history The penitentiaries at Cayenne and Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni persisted for an inordinately long time, considering that apart from absorbing the overflow from the prison system in Metropolitan France they didn’t achieve all that much that was positive. The penal colonies were not only a humanitarian catastrophe, but an economic disaster…the planted crops failed badly and self-sufficiently was never achieved, signalling a complete failure in the objective of transforming the bagnards into settlers. In one year alone, 1865, the soaring cost of the FG enterprise reached in excess of 3.75 million francs! (Sanchez). After Salvation Army adjutant Charles Péan exposed the horrors, the utter inhumanity, of France’s Devil’s Island in a damning investigation⌽, the French authorities dragged their feet for another 25 years before they finally drew the curtain on this shameful chapter of their penal history [‘Devil’s Island’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].
(Map: BBC News)
Endnote: These days France calls Guyane française an overseas department rather than a colony, and the colonial prisons are barely a distant memory. Instead today FP hosts the Guiana Space Centre (close to the town of Kourou), a Spaceport run in conjunction with the European Space Agency.
Changing pattern of deportations from metropole to colonies 1852-1866: majority of deportees sent to French Guiana From 1866: deportees from Europe sent to New Caledonia From 1866: deportees from North Africa, Asia and the Caribbean sent to French Guiana
§§a rider to the system was that the ultimate destination of deportees could also depend on whether they were common or political prisoners
▂▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂ ▂.▂ ▂ ▂ ▂▂
❋ while lightening the burden on the government for domestic prison expenditure
⧆ plus a scattering of sub-camps of convicts located around different parts of French Guiana
⦿ mainly traitors (or accused ones like Dreyfus) and political dissidents. In WWI it housed spies and deserters (Donnelly). Others falling foul of French colonial justice ended up in Caribbean penal holdings on islands such as Guadalupe and Martinique
❂ the macabre pet name of inmates for Devil’s Island was the “Dry Guillotine” (“it kills it’s victims more slowly than the actual guillotine but kills them just as certainly”)
✦ women convicts were transported to FG, but there were only just shy of 400 deported in the duration of the penal colony
⌽ in 1928 duty of care was still non-existent: the prison administrators’ gross negligence was still resulting in 400 inmates dying each year and 2,400 freed prisoners left to fend for themselves
Australian Anxieties about the Neighbourhood: 19th Century French New Caledonia, an Uncomfortable Presence in a “British Lake”
These days the Australian government it seems welcomes the French presence in New Caledonia. Canberra offered a tacit endorsement of France’s retention of its colonial hold over New Caledonia following the recent referendum which voted for a second time against independence for the French Pacific colony. From a geopolitical standpoint it seems that it is in Canberra’s interest for the French, a Western naval power, to continue to have a stake in the Pacific…as it constitutes the existence of a “significant counterweight” to the uncertain but fluid intentions of China in respect of the western Pacific [‘Australia is part of a Black region; it should recognise Kanaky ambition in New Caledonia’, (Hamish McDonald), The Guardian, 25-Oct-2020, www.theguardian.com].
Noumea, NC ▵
A look back into history reveals that Australia hasn’t always been as sanguine about the French settlement in its near Pacific island neighbour. The French connection with New Caledonia formally began in 1853 when it established a colony, settling a small expat population from Metropolitan France. Prior to this time the British through its colony in New South Wales had assumed a sort of “titular control” of New Caledonia❋. As well as being within the British-Australian sphere of influence, there was a pre-existing triangular trade between Australia, the New Caledonian islands and China… Australian merchants traded iron and metal utensils and tools and tobacco for sandalwood with the native (Kanak) population, which the merchants then exchanged with China for tea [‘The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australia’s View of New Caledonia In The 19th Century’, (Elizabeth Rechniewski), Portal. 2015. Vol 12, No 1. http://doi.org/10.5130/portal.V12i1.4095].
France’s decision to annex New Caledonia (NC)—a further sign to the British of French imperial designs in the south Pacific after its earlier acquisition of Tahiti—prompted a considerable degree of commotion within the Australian colonies. They criticised the colonial office in London for being lax in not having secured the colonisation of NC by Britain to block just such a takeover by the French. Australian newspapers like the Moreton Bay Courier had been warning for some time of NC’s suitability as an ideal location for a naval station from which to attack the Australian coast (Rechiewski).
Pacific pénitentaires◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌Australian concerns and anxieties grew exponentially in 1864 when the French turned NC into a penal colony using Britain’s penal system as a model – prisons were established at two locations, at Île Nou (Noumea Bay) on Grande Terre (NC’s main island), and a second pénitentaire on Île des Pins (Isle of Pines, or Kunié in Melanesian culture)✪. The outcry from the press in Australia and from some politicians against the French presence intensified…a NSW colonial secretary urged Britain take diplomatic action to discourage Paris from continuing the transportation of “these scum of France”. The intensity of Australian hostility to the NC penal colony, has led one historian to suggest that the fierceness of the opposition may have reflected an element of post-convict shame” within Australian society itself, given that transportation to Australia had only recently been ended [Jill Donohoo, ‘Australian Reactions to the French Penal Colony in New Caledonia’, Explorations: A Journal of French-Australian Connections, 54, 25-45, www.isfar.org.au].
▿ Isle of Pines: vestiges du Bagne (Photo: Marco Ramerini/www.colonialvoyage.com)
19th century “boat people”: Apprehensive eyes looking west ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ In the last quarter of the century the principal external anxiety, especially for Queenslanders and New South Welshmen, was the fear of ‘invasion’ from bagnards or forçats (convicts) in NC. Many east coasters on the mainland were fixated on the threat of convicts—either having escaped from the NC colony or whose sentences had expired or had been pardoned—coming to Australia. Although perhaps exaggerated in actual numbers involved, the incidence of arrivals was more than merely perception, with periodic if isolated boatloads landing mainly on the Queensland coast (also in NSW and some reached New Zealand). With France flagging its intent to increase its transportation of habitual criminals to NC in the 1880s, anxieties further intensified. An additional concern was that in the event of a war erupting between France and Britain, France might unleash boatloads of the most dangereux kind of convicts in menacing numbers onto coastal Australian towns. A French proposal at the time to up the annual transportation numbers of bagnards including lifers to NC and to extend transportation to the adjoining Loyalty Islands as well, did nothing to abate Australian apprehensions [‘The problem of French escapees from New Caledonia’, (Clem Llewellyn Lack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1954].
Queensland’s northward anxieties◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌At the same time the Queensland colonial government in particular was equally anxious about imperial German ambitions in the region. Fear of German intentions to annex the eastern half of New Guinea to its immediate north, prompted Queensland first to push the colonial office in London to ratify a British protectorate over the southern portion of eastern New Guinea, and then to unilaterally and rashly plunge ahead with its own plans for annexation in 1883 [‘Queensland’s Annexation of Papua: A Background to Anglo-German Friction’, (Peter Overlack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1979].
Conditions in the Île des Pins were of an extreme nature, the bagnards were subjected to cellular isolation, material deprivation and endemic disease, and worse, they were brutalised, beaten and tortured by the guards. The severity of their treatment was conceivably aggravated by the invidious situation of the wardens who themselves were in a kind of “occupational neverworld” (Toth). Entrapped in a low pay, no future work environment, the guards were looked on by both administrators and prisoners as merely “loathed turnkeys” [‘The Lords of Discipline. The Penal Colony Guards of New Caledonia and Guyana’, (Stephen A Toth). Crime, Histoire and Sociétés. Vol. 7. No. 2, 2003. Varia. http://doi.org/10.4000/che.544].
By the time France ceased transportation to the Nouvelle Calédonia pénitentaires in 1897—a decision prompted by the economic failure of using bagnard labour to colonise NC rather than by any humanitarian motives—anywhere up to a total of 40,000 convicts had been transported since 1864. This included some 5,000 political prisoners – the Communards, transported for their involvement in the Paris Commune revolt at the end of Napoleon III’s disastrous 1870 war with Prussia (Lack).
Spying for the nation, the first tentative steps ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ Nouvelle Calédonia and other Pacific islands played a role in the formative days of Australia’s espionage history. In 1902 Major William Bridges, acting on orders from the commander of the Australian land forces General Hutton, undertook a military spy mission to NC with the purpose of ascertaining the strength of fortifications in the French Pacific colony. Bridges came to this task already with experience of intelligence work having been on a mission to Samoa in 1896 to suss out German designs for the island [‘The growth of the Australian intelligence community and the Anglo-American connection’, (Christopher Andrew), Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 4, 1989 – Issue 2, 218-256, http://doi.org/10.1080/02684528908431996; Richard Hall, The Secret State: Australia’s Spy Industry, (1978)].
Aside from having French and German ambitions in the region to worry about, the Australian colonies from the 1890s had a new threat to preoccupy them, Japan. Through a series of bold and aggressive moves—annexing Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea , establishing a foothold on the Chinese mainland, and in defeating Tsarist Russia in a Pacific war—Japan signalled it’s arrival as a force in the Asia/Pacific region, and a rival to British-Australian (or Australasian) dominance in the western Pacific. As the 20th century progressed Australian anxieties about the “Japanese menace” would reach a level of hysteria.
PostScript: New Hebrides – contested ground ◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌By the 1880s the Australian colonies’ concern about the French in NC had extended to elsewhere in Oceania, especially its ambitions for nearby New Hebrides (NH). Some in Australia feared that France might use NC as a base to annex Nouvelles-Hebrides and energies in Australia were directed at ensuring the British government blocked any French attempts to plant the French tricolour on the island group. In 1886 France did just this, establishing military posts with small detachments of troops at two ports, Havannah and Sandwich. The Queensland government, alarmed that this presaged French intentions to also use NH as a convict dump, pressured London into securing assurances from Paris to the contrary (Lack).
Condominium compromise Notwithstanding this, the French maintained a presence in NH and tensions between the British and French on the islands persisted, including some violent exchanges between the two groups. In 1904-06 a curious solution of sorts was reached with an accord in which both sides made concessions⚉, future governance of NH was to comprise an Anglo-French Condominium. This created a dual system with separate administrations (known as residencies) in Port Vila, police forces, prisons and hospitals▣. The French and British residencies had control over their own ressortissants (‘nationals’) with separate Francophone and Anglophone communities – which led to the inevitable communication difficulties. All of this administrative duplication proved unwieldy and at times unworkable. In the middle of what some cynics tagged “the Pandemonium” rather than the Condominium were the disadvantaged indigenous population of NH, the Ni-Vanuatu who were left stateless (proving difficulties for some of them later trying to travel overseas when they found that they lacked a proper passport) [‘New Hebrides’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Lack]. The unique if bothersome governance arrangement continued until 1980 when the island state finally gained independence as Vanuatu.
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❋ the island chain’s first visit from a European was by Captain Cook in 1774 who gave it its name but didn’t formally claim if for Great Britain
✪ prior to colonising New Caledonia France had shown an interest in the southwestern region of Australia as a possible repository to offload criminals from overcrowded French jails [Bennett, B. (2006). In the Shadows: The Spy in Australian Literary and Cultural History. Antipodes, 20(1), 28-37. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org./stable/41957504]. A few French convicts were despatched to a spot in the Pacific even more remote, Tahiti
⚉ France recognised the British occupation of Egypt in return for recognition of its interests in Morocco
▣ though there was a Joint Court established for all residents