Early French Prisons / Le Grand and Le Petit Châtelets; Vincennes; The Bastile; Loches; The Galleys; Revolutionary Prisons

The Project Gutenberg eBook, The History and Romance of Crime: Early French Prisons, by Arthur George Frederick Griffiths
An Incident During the Communal Revolts of the Twelfth Century
A noble being strangled in his castle by one of the men of the commune (town) in the twelfth century when the villages at the foot of the castles revolted and wrested charters from their lords, often peacefully but more frequently by bloodshed and brutal practices.
EDITION NATIONALE
Limited to one thousand registered and numbered sets.
NUMBER 307

The judicial administration of France had its origin in the Feudal System. The great nobles ruled their estates side by side with, and not under, the King. With him the great barons exercised “high” justice, extending to life and limb. The seigneurs and great clerics dispensed “middle” justice and imposed certain corporal penalties, while the power of “low” justice, extending only to the amende and imprisonment, was wielded by smaller jurisdictions.
The whole history of France is summed up in the persistent effort of the King to establish an absolute monarchy, and three centuries were passed in a struggle between nobles, parliaments and the eventually supreme ruler. Each jurisdiction was supported by various methods of enforcing its authority: All, however, had their prisons, which served many purposes. The prison was first of all a place of detention and durance where people deemed dangerous might be kept out of the way of doing harm and law-breakers could be called to account for their misdeeds. Accused persons were in it held safely until they could be arraigned before the tri bunals, and after conviction by legal process were sentenced to the various penalties in force.
The prison was de facto the high road to the scaffold on which the condemned suffered the extreme penalty by one or another of the forms of capital punishment, and death was dealt out indifferently by decapitation, the noose, the stake or the wheel. Too often where proof was weak or wanting, torture was called in to assist in extorting confession of guilt, and again, the same hideous practice was applied to the convicted, either to aggravate their pains or to compel the betrayal of suspected confederates and accomplices. The prison reflected every phase of passing criminality and was the constant home of wrong-doers of all categories, heinous and venial. Offenders against the common law met their just retribution. Many thousands were committed for sins political and non-criminal, the victims of an arbitrary monarch and his high-handed, irresponsible ministers.