Exil pénal et circulations forcées dans l’Empire colonial français

Abstract

The law of May 30,1854 on the execution of the sentence of hard labor turned French Guiana into an experimental territory for a penal, agricultural and colonial utopia. Between 1852 and 1867, penal colonists represented only 1.32% of the workforce. The category «Arab convict» made its appearance in 1866 in the official statistics of the penitentiary administration of French Guiana. In 1867, the decision of the French government to temporarily halt the transport of European undesirables greatly altered the sociology of the penal colony. In order to impart a second wind to the prison colony project, a decision was made to tap into the pool of indigenous convicts to supply French Guiana with vital recruits. From 1868 to 1887, this pool was composed mainly of «Arab convicts» mostly from Algeria. The purpose of this article is to revisit the political and social context of the Algerian period in the French Guiana penal colony (1867-1887), to record these as part of the geography of «trans-imperial» forced transports, tracing the contours of the first generation of Algerian convicts. To do this, we chose to establish our body of sources around the convoy of July 27, 1868, which seems to have been the first convoy of Algerian convicts since the provisional suspension of European convict transports to French Guiana.

Keywords

• Algeria
• forced labor
• French Guiana
• Toulon
• conquest
• Second Empire