[BOOK] Outrage – An Anarchist memoir of the Penal Colony by Clément Duval

In 1852 the French state began shipping convicts to their prison colonies in Guiana. In the end over 70.000 men had been sent there. At least ¾ of them died there. Around 5000 made it back to France as free men, 9000 tried to escape, few of them survived but one of the surviving escapees was the anarchist Clément Duval. Condemned to life of hard labour for his crimes; breaking and entering and wounding a police officer, which he readily admitted. He had been in the colony, managing to adjust to the hard life, when in 1892 after new law allowed the state to condemn people for opinions, many other anarchists were shipped to the colony for crimes like putting up propaganda posters, insulting police officers, boasting about living outside the job market or agreeing with characters like Ravachol and Emil Henry who ended in the guillotine for their crimes.

This sentence did not mean breaking rock in a faraway land, it was systematic violence where the guards put the prisoners up against each other, snitching to survive, and the guards stealing and selling off the food and clothes meant for the prisoners. The penal colony was called “the dry guillotine” but Duval survived all his 18 escape attempts and finally made it to the USA where the community of Italian anarchists in New York welcomed him. This book is based on his much longer memoirs. Duval seems to have been quite a character, a proud anarchist with a strong sense of comradeship who knew his rights as a prisoner and never allowed his oppressors to get the better of him. His book tells how men lived and died in the colonies besides being part of anarchist history and a little insight into the historical insanity of the state since the last person to be condemned by the French state to the colonies was let go in 1956. [PM Press]
- Sigurður Harðarson

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