Transient Small ‘e’ empires in the Americas: The Méxican Experiment 1

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Biographical, Regional History

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

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Regional History

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].

⍋ Berberousse Prison (Algiers) (Image: vitaminedz.com)

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].

⍋ Con Dao Prison (Photo: asiaopentours.net)

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/].

(Image: Cambridge Univ. Press)

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

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
Inter-ethnic relations, International Relations, Popular Culture, Racial politics, Regional History, Social History

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 French Guiana (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 hefty 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”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
International Relations, Political geography, Racial politics, Regional History

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].

Memorial to 1871 political deportes, Île des Pins

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