Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 2

by H. Sutherland Edwards

What chiefly strikes a visitor to the place is the regular and geometrical plan on which the whole prison is constructed. The arrangements are of the most perfect description, though it was complained some years since that the method of arranging divine service—the door of each cell being kept ajar, so that the prisoner can see the altar and the officiating priest—provided to a large part of the prisoners little more than a curious spectacle.

The prison of Sainte-Pélagie, founded in 1665, owes its name to a holy penitent of the fifth century, who was a famous actress at Antioch, when, after hearing a sermon from the bishop of Heliopolis, she became a convert to Christianity, received baptism, liberated her slaves, and made over her property to the bishop that it might be given to the poor. Then, clothing herself in a rough garment, she made her way secretly to Jerusalem, and there built herself a cell on the Mount of Olives, where she led the most austere life. In memory of Sainte Pélagie, Madame Beauharnais de Miramion, who, according to the memoirs of the eighteenth century, had for years led a life of pleasure, built an immense house of refuge for young girls. As the rule of life laid down by the pious founder (though she herself submitted to it) seemed too strict to the young women of the establishment, as well as to their families, they were one by one withdrawn, until at last the mistress of the house found herself alone. Then Madame de Miramion—determined that someone should do penance—addressed herself to women and girls of loose life, when those who were really tired of their wild existence, with others who had lost all personal charms, accepted the hospitality offered to them at Sainte-Pélagie. Gradually the number of[{139}] repentant Magdalens—thanks not only to goodwill on their part but to the intervention of the police—became so great that many of them had to be moved to the convent of Les Filles de la Mère-Dieu.

When in 1789 the Revolution broke out, the gates of Sainte-Pélagie were thrown open like those of the convents; and the repentant girls, equally with the nuns, were at liberty to leave their cells. Two years later the Commune of Paris converted the building into a prison, where men and women were confined for all sorts of offences, political as well as criminal. From 1797 until 1834 Sainte-Pélagie was a debtors’ prison, and it was then changed into a house of correction for juvenile offenders, vagabonds below the age of sixteen, and children found hopeless by their parents.

Under the Second Empire, as for a time under the First and during a portion of the Restoration, Sainte-Pélagie was exclusively a state prison. Here it was that the first Napoleon—in the words of an anti-Bonapartist writer—“shut up those citizens who displeased him and failed to manifest for his policy all the enthusiasm he desired.” To this despot is due the introduction at Sainte-Pélagie of special registers, called “registers of persons brought beneath the notice of the administration”—in other words, beneath the notice of the police. The Restoration continued this work—the imprisonment, that is to say, of suspected persons—as practised alike under the Empire, the Republic, and the ancient Monarchy. At the beginning of Louis XVIII.’s reign no less than 135 persons were arrested by the king’s private police, simply as having served under Napoleon in the Imperial Guard.

In the courtyard of Sainte-Pélagie stands a chapel, built under the Restoration by the Duchess of Berri, which among other curiosities contains an altar-cloth worked by the Duchess de Praslin, whose tragic death at the hands of her husband has already been related, and a Via Dolorosa, painted by a prisoner who had been condemned for immoral pictures. All the Catholic prisoners, with the exception of those sentenced for political and press offences, are obliged to be present on Sundays and holidays at mass and at vespers. A platoon of infantry also assists at these ceremonies.

The prisoners are divided into three categories. The first includes those who are exempted from work without being obliged to pay for the privilege; these are the political offenders and persons who have contravened the laws relating to the press. The second comprises those who, for a payment averaging from six or seven francs a fortnight, purchase the right not to labour. To the third belong all the prisoners who are obliged to work in the shops directed by the speculator who farms the prison. These last receive but a third part of the wages paid by the speculator. Of the two other thirds, one goes to the administration, the other to the prisoner the day he is set at liberty. A prison-workman gains on the average two francs twenty-five centimes a month, of which he receives, as his own particular share, five centimes or one sou per day, which he is allowed to spend in the prison canteen.

In France, as in England, different views are entertained on the subject of prison-labour. The prisoners must work; and it is both wasteful and cruel to employ them without advantage to themselves or anyone else—as, for instance, in drawing water and then throwing it away. If, however, they are employed, like the occupants of Sainte-Pélagie and other French prisons, with useful work they are brought into competition with the honest workman outside. The political prisoners, and the prisoners who are allowed to liberate themselves from work by small payments, are permitted to order from the outside, by the intermediary of commissionaires attached to the prison for that purpose, whatever food and drink they may require. “Luxuries,” it is true, are not permitted by the prison regulations, but it rests with the officials to determine what a “luxury” really means.

Prisoners at this, as at some of the other Paris prisons, are allowed to send out letters, but copies of them are made and kept in the governor’s office. By this system not only the prisoner but France and the whole world has, in some cases, profited. It was through copies being made of the eloquent and passionate, if not too edifying, epistles addressed by Mirabeau, during his confinement in the Bastille, to the young woman he was so desperately in love with that the now famous “Lettres à Sophie” were preserved.

The ordinary inhabitants of Sainte-Pélagie are, in addition to the political and newspaper offenders, juvenile thieves, tradesmen whose scales have not been found sufficiently impartial, with fraudulent bankrupts and debtors to the state—the only ones who, since the abolition of imprisonment for debt in civil and commercial matters, are still liable to confinement.

The official staff of Sainte-Pélagie consists of a[{140}] governor, a physician in chief with two assistants, a dispenser, a Roman Catholic priest, a registrar, a clerk, a brigadier, twelve warders, three commissionaires, a female searcher, a barber (who recruits his auxiliaries from among the prisoners), a sutler, and a sempstress. The prison is guarded by a company of infantry stationed at different posts.