Mont-Saint-Michel is among the most photographed buildings in France. For most of the nineteenth century it was a prison, and the people who ran it gutted a Gothic masterpiece to make room for inmates.
The Horror
The Benedictines left in 1791. By 1793 the abbey was a prison, called the “Mont libre”, holding more than 300 priests who had refused to swear loyalty to the republic. Under Napoleon it became a penitentiary in 1811 and, in 1817, a house of force and correction. The abbey church was cut across by two floors, with only the choir kept for worship. Prisoners were put to work, including in a straw-hat workshop that employed up to 700 of them. A fire there in 1834 damaged the abbey. The place was known as the “Bastille of the Sea”. French Wikipedia puts the total at 14,000 prisoners by the time it closed.
Among the political prisoners were Armand Barbès and Auguste Blanqui, the revolutionaries of the 1839 Paris rising. Barbès was sentenced to death in July 1839 and pardoned after an intervention by Victor Hugo, which one source ties to a poem addressed to Louis-Philippe. Blanqui joined him after his own commutation in February 1840. Both were involved in an escape attempt dated 10 January 1842, which failed. Barbès was gravely ill with laryngeal tuberculosis and was moved to the prison at Nîmes in late November 1842. Retellings that give the escape as a night in February 1842 with a rope of knotted sheets differ from this account, and those details are unconfirmed.
Hugo had seen the place and, according to French Wikipedia, wrote that one seemed to see a toad in a reliquary. He was among those who by 1836 were campaigning to save the abbey as a national treasure. Napoleon III closed the prison in 1863, and about 650 prisoners were moved to the mainland.
The Legend
The abbey’s earlier history as a state prison under the old kings carries stories of an iron cage. One account says the Duke of Chartres, later Louis-Philippe, ordered its demolition. The grimmest details attached to the cage and to supposed oubliettes are not established here and are unconfirmed.
The Modern Relic
The prison’s most distinctive machine, a treadwheel crane, hauled supplies up the abbey wall, with prisoners walking inside it. Guides to the abbey list the Great Wheel among the sights, though where it stands on the route, and its date, are unconfirmed. Dates given for it vary by source.
The abbey came back to religious use. Benedictine monks returned in 1966, and the site was listed by UNESCO in 1979. It stands about 48.636 N, 1.511 W, on an island in a tidal bay.
