Today, I shall start a new series, exploring the story of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana through some of the things I encountered on my travels. I start with this, a plaster cast of a convict’s foot, seen in the museum in Cayenne (Fr G). The foot is grossly deformed, and the label says that the cast was made whilst the prisoner was under torture.
Today, I shall start a new series, exploring the story of Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana through some of the things I encountered on my travels. I start with this, a plaster cast of a convict’s foot, seen in the museum in Cayenne (Fr G). The foot is grossly deformed, and the label says that the cast was made whilst the prisoner was under torture.
Between 1858 and 1946, over 67,000 convicts were sent to French Guiana. These weren’t ordinary people but France’s most colourful and violent criminals. Most famous of all was Henri Charrière, alias ‘Papillon’ but there was also Dieudonne of the Amiens gang, the first thug to use a machine-gun in France; and the Comte de Bérac, who’d killed the child he’d fathered by his maid. There was even the odd Englishman, like George Seaton. ‘Even I, the effete socialite,’ he wrote, years later, ‘acquired a sinewy brutality … I slid back several centuries and obeyed the law that said, ‘If all else fails, I shall survive’ …’ The plaster foot speaks volumes for the cruelty of that time.
