Papillon, published in France in 1969, is the most famous convict memoir ever written. It tells of a safecracker with a butterfly tattooed on his chest who is framed for murder, sent to the French penal colony in Guiana, and escapes again and again until he reaches freedom in Venezuela. The colony was real, and it was as bad as the book says. The man at the centre of the book is much harder to pin down.
The Horror
Henri Charrière was born on November 16, 1906 in the Ardèche. In 1931 he was convicted of killing a pimp. The book calls the victim Roland Le Petit, and Wikipedia’s article on Charrière gives the name as Roland Legrande. He always denied the killing, while admitting to lesser crimes. In 1933 he was shipped to French Guiana.
The system he entered had been running since the middle of the nineteenth century. The prison at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, on the Maroni River, was set up in 1858 and was the main reception point: nearly every convict from France passed through it before being sent on to other camps. Its worst camp, Charvein, was known as the “Camp de la Mort”. Worse offenders and escapees were sent to the Îles du Salut offshore. More than 80,000 prisoners passed through the Guiana system over its life, and the great majority never returned. The death rate is described as reaching 75 percent at its worst. Figures for the whole colony vary between sources and should be read as estimates.
Release did not end the sentence. Under the doublage rule, set by a law of 1854, a convict had to stay in the colony after serving the sentence for a period equal to it, and for any sentence over eight years that meant for life. In 1938 René Belbenoît published The Dry Guillotine, the title that gave the colony its nickname for the slow killing by disease and labour. Public anger at the book led to the end of transports that year, and the colony was wound up between 1946 and 1953. Wikipedia’s article on the Saint-Laurent prison places a guillotine in the condemned men’s block there.
The Legend
Papillon says Charrière escaped from Devil’s Island on a raft of coconuts in 1941, after repeated attempts, and reached Venezuela in 1944. The French records tell a different story. They say he worked as a hospital nursing assistant, failed to escape in 1934, and escaped from the Cascades camp on the mainland in 1944. Officials said he never served time on Devil’s Island at all. Devil’s Island itself was a tiny facility that usually held no more than about a dozen people.
Charrière called his book “75 percent true”. A French justice ministry report said its episodes should be divided by at least ten to get near the truth. Critics have said that some of the book’s best-known episodes, among them a shark rescue, belong to other convicts, and a Paris man named Charles Brunier claimed in 2005 to be the real Papillon. How much is memory, how much borrowed and how much invented is unconfirmed.
The Modern Relic
After the colony closed, Charrière became a naturalised Venezuelan with restaurants in Caracas and Maracaibo. The 1970 English translation by Patrick O’Brian carried the book abroad, and the 1973 film with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman fixed the story in popular memory. A second film followed in 2017. Charrière was pardoned for the 1931 conviction in 1970 and died in Madrid on July 29, 1973.
In Guiana, two of the Îles du Salut are open to visitors, while Devil’s Island is closed to landing and can be seen from a boat. On the mainland at Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, some of the old prison buildings were restored in the early 1980s.
