Throughout the ninety-year French colonization of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos (1863-1954), approximately eight thousand prisoners were exiled to twelve different geographical locations the length and breadth of the colonial French Empire. From Gabon to Guiana, there was hardly a corner to which these prisoners were not sent. Prisoners from Indochina went to the following sites: Gabon, Congo (both incorporated into French Equatorial Africa in 1910), Obock (later part of French Somaliland), French Guiana, New Caledonia, Madagascar, Réunion, Martinique, Guadeloupe, Algeria, and French Oceania (both Tahiti and the Marquesas). Some locations – Algeria, Tahiti, and the Marquesas – were used mainly for elite political exiles. The geographic expanse to which these prisoners could be exiled would be surprising even to dedicated scholars of the countries of French Indochina.
The three key categories of prisoners: exiles, deported prisoners (sometimes political prisoners), and transported prisoners (common-law prisoners) were classifications that blurred and overlapped. And the locations to which prisoners were sent changed over time, depending on the needs of these sites or demands coming from the colonial offices in Paris. The desire to encourage settlement and family formation also shifted depending on the time or the location itself. In our project we are exploring how families were formed in often fraught penal and post-penal conditions and the descendant communities which emerged from these coerced migrations.
Male prisoners were the vast majority of those sent from French Indochina, and this was true throughout the history of penal deportation from France. High mortality among French women meant that their transportation ended in 1906. Few women from Indochina were transported and female prisoners have been harder to trace; only ten Vietnamese women are recorded in the 3185 female prisoner files to be found in the French archive in Aix en Provence, with no female Cambodian or Laotians listed. Some of these women married their fellow prisoners in sites as diverse as the Congo and New Caledonia.
French Guiana was the most common destination for male prisoners from Indochina as the prisoners were considered constitutionally better equipped to withstand tropical diseases. Although exposure to malaria in the climates of Indochina could certainly assist in building up immunity, yellow fever was initially the most virulent (and often fatal) disease in French Guiana. Yellow fever meant French Guiana was an extremely difficult place in which to thrive, although the reason for the fever’s prevalence was not understood until the end of the nineteenth century. Malaria also posed a big problem. Mortality rates were very high, and in the first years of the penal colony between 1852 and 1866, close to 40% of all the convicts died. In 1867, the government prohibited the transportation of French citizens to French Guiana. Only “African and Arab prisoners whose constitutions are resistant to the climate of the colony should be sent.” Although the intention was to punish criminals, it was also assumed that they would be regenerated by life and work in a far-off rural environment. Regeneration was also about the construction of families, however given the dearth of women sent to French Guiana this created problems in the creation of these families.
The kinds of jobs that prisoners did impacted their longevity or their ability to form kinship networks. So, an interesting aspect of the project has been to think about where and how prisoners became part of interwoven family communities.
Prisoners from French Indochina were generally considered to be extremely useful prisoners. From private employers to the colonial administration itself, everyone wanted to employ some of these prisoners. Indeed, the stereotype that Indochinese (especially Vietnamese) were diligent workers sometimes assisted them in getting lighter, less guarded, tasks. For example, Cambodians were often put into domestic agricultural work, including attempts at rice cultivation which was considered less arduous than clearing forests.
Throughout the French Empire, prisoners from Indochina nearly always occupied one of three roles: domestic servant, agricultural worker or fisherman. As fishermen, new forms of Vietnamese communities were created and then immortalized in images like the postcard below. In St Laurent du Maroni in French Guiana throughout the 1890s, Vietnamese convicts were allowed to build “Vietnamese-style” houses over the Maroni River and had a virtual monopoly over fishing; catches were sold in the local market and also used to supplement the meagre fare of the guards.
(As a sidenote, the postmark on this postcard is from the Iles du Salut of which Devil’s Island is the most famous. The fishing village was of sufficient note to put it on a French postcard in 1911.)
Also, on the Laussant Canal, which ran through Cayenne in French Guiana, archival reports documented that, “the Vietnamese have formed a veritable village where they help people with illnesses which are dealt with within the community.” However, what women were part of this community? In French Guiana, given the dearth of Vietnamese women who did the Vietnamese prisoners marry? Often marriages took place with the descendants of those formerly enslaved, or those descended from maroon families, as well as with members of the indigenous communities of French Guiana.
Courting in the Kiosk or Married At (Almost) First Sight
One site where prisoner marriage was encouraged was New Caledonia, a penal colony established by the French as a “healthier” alternative to French Guiana. New Caledonia promoted marriages between French and Vietnamese convicts in the 1860s. If a female prisoner expressed interest, a meeting would be arranged in a kiosk structure, built between the convent and the prison. Under strict supervision, the couples were allowed to talk and discuss potentially linking their carceral lives together.
To the left of this photo is the kiosk where the initial meetings between eligible convicts would take place. The design of the kiosk made it easy for the guards to see inside and make sure the speed courting took place without anything becoming too rowdy. As the British traveller Griffith noted, “Along a path, which cuts the only approach to the kiosk, a guard marched, revolver on hip and eye on the kiosk ready to respond to any warning sign from the Mother Superior.”
Observers said that the maximum meetings usually required to negotiate a marriage was three! Just long enough to establish any assets the other might have (e.g., animals or mosquito nets) and whether the prospective spouse seemed healthy or not; syphilis and T.B. were rampant amongst the prison population of New Caledonia.
Bourail in New Caledonia became the area where many of these couples were granted land concessions and settled into diverse communities. Later the Vietnamese communities of New Caledonia were joined by indentured workers from Tonkin, northern Vietnam, and the two communities often intermarried.
In our project we are exploring how these coerced migrations of prisoners from French Indochina created a diversity of unforeseen personal, economic, and societal repercussions focusing on descendant communities in three different locations: New Caledonia, French Guiana and Réunion Island.
In the past, I have written about the idea of mobility, of prisoners moving throughout different sites of the French Empire and the repercussions of coerced migrations. Archives throughout France and the former French Empire provided part of my map as I navigated routes and narrated lives. Now the descendant communities created by those migrations is the focus of our exploration. Unions begun in contexts like the courtship kiosk, interwoven with archival traces, family histories and descendant interviews will tell a new narrative of inter-colonial penal transportation and the descendant lives and communities created.
Lorraine M. Paterson
Further Reading
Louis-Jose Barbançon, L’Archipel des Forçats: Historie du Bagne du Nouvelle Caledonie, 1863-1931. Nord-Pas Du Calais: Presse Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003.
George Griffith, In an Unknown Prison Land: An Account of Convicts and Colonists in New Caledonia with Jottings Out and Home. London: Hutchinson and Co, 1901.
Lorraine M. Paterson, ”Ethnoscapes of Exile: Political Prisoners from Indochina in a Colonial Asian World’, International Review of Social History 63 (S26) (2018), 89-107.
- ‘Prisoners from Indochina in the Nineteenth-Century French Colonial World’, in Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts and Commemoration, ed. R. Ricci (University of Hawai’i Press, 2016).
Stephen A. Toth, Beyond Papillon: The French Overseas Penal Colonies 1854-1952 Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.