Memoirs of a revolutionist

by kniaz Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin

There was another point which I vividly realized since the very first weeks of my imprisonment, but which, in some inconceivable way, escapes the attention of both the judges and the writers on criminal law—namely, that imprisonment in an immense number of cases is a punishment which strikes quite innocent people far more severely than the condemned prisoners themselves.

Nearly every one of my comrades, who represented a fair average of the working-men population, had either their wife and children to support, or a sister or an old mother who depended for their living upon his earnings. Now, being left without support, these women did their best to get work, and some of them got it, but none of them succeeded in earning regularly even as much as fifteen pence a day. Nine francs (less than eight shillings), and often six shillings a week, to support themselves and their children was all they could earn. And that meant evidently underfeeding, privations of all sorts, and the deterioration of the health of the wife and the children: weakened intellect, weakened energy and will. I thus realized that what was going on in our law courts was in reality a condemnation of quite innocent people to all sorts of hardships, in most cases even worse than those to which the condemned man himself is submitted. The fiction is that the law punishes the man by inflicting upon him a variety of physical and degrading hardships. But man is such a creature that whatever hardships be imposed upon him, he gradually grows accustomed to them. As he cannot modify them he accepts them, and after a certain time he puts up with them, just as he puts up with a chronic disease, and grows insensible to it. But what, during his imprisonment, becomes of his wife and children, that is, of the innocent people who depend upon him for support? They are punished even more cruelly than he himself is. And in our routine habits of thought no one ever thinks of the immense injustice which is thus committed. I realized it only from actual experience.

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

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

The first impression which Clairvaux produced upon me was most favourable. We had been locked up and had been travelling all the day, from two or three o’clock in the morning, in those tiny cupboards into which the cellular railway carriages are usually divided. When we reached the central prison we were taken temporarily to the cellular, or punishment quarters, and were introduced into the usual but extremely clean cells. Hot food, plain but of excellent quality, had been served to us notwithstanding the late hour of the night, and we had been offered the opportunity of having the half-pint of very good vin du pays (local wine) which was sold to the prisoners by the prison canteen, at the extremely low price of 24 centimes (less than 2½d.) per quart. The governor and the warders were most polite to us.

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

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

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

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

I was quite astonished to discover that the central prison of Clairvaux had all the aspects of a small manufacturing town, surrounded by orchards and cornfields, all encircled by an outer wall. The fact is that if in a French central prison the inmates are perhaps more dependent upon the fancies and caprices of the governor and the warders than they seem to be in English prisons, the treatment of the prisoners is far more humane than it is in the corresponding lock-ups on this side of the Channel. The mediæval spirit of revenge which still prevails in English prisons has long since been given up in France. The imprisoned man is not compelled to sleep on planks, or to have a mattress on alternate days only; the day he comes to the prison he gets a decent bed and retains it. He is not compelled either to do degrading work, such as to climb a wheel, or to pick oakum; he is employed, on the contrary, in useful work, and this is why the Clairvaux prison has the aspect of a manufacturing town in which iron furniture, picture-frames, looking-glasses, metric measures, velvet, linen, ladies’ stays, small things in mother-of-pearl, wooden shoes, and so on, are fabricated by the nearly 1,600 men who are kept there.