Pour une inscription des bagnes de Guyane et de Nouvelle-Calédonie à la Liste du patrimoine mondial de l’Unesco

Abstract

The prison heritage of French Guiana and New-Caledonia consists of remains of great value, both for their integrity and the fact that they reflect a shared history to those two territories. The prison colonisation of these two old colonies by France from 1852 to 1953 has led to the sending of more than 100,000 convicts with the aim to encourage them to move on site at the end of their sentence in order to ensure the establishment of a society of settlement. While taking part in the economic development of the French colonial empire, this penalty aimed at the reintegration into society of thousands of convicted people seen as undesirable on French metropolitan soil and of other colonies. This model was directly inspired from the one implemented by Great Britain in Australia which sent there, from 1788 to 1868, more than 160,000 convicts. In 2010, Australia initiated the inscription on Unesco’s world heritage list of eleven of its penal sites. This operation enabled the conversion of old prisons associated with a painful memory into first-class tourist attractions and remembrance sites. This article presents the exceptional prison heritage of French Guiana and New-Caledonia and the assets of its remains so that they can, in turn, join Unesco’s world heritage list.

Keywords

• Australia
• French Guiana
• New-Caledonia
• penal institution
• Unesco’s world heritage
• remains