“[D]e mille bastilles sur le sol de la République”: Prisons and the Experience of Imprisonment during the French Revolution, 1789-1795

The French Revolution began with the fall of a prison, and its demolition was to haunt the proceeding revolutionary decade: from the attempted use of penal spaces to create a new socio-political order, to their accentuated visibility as possible counter-revolutionary bastions, to their cultural production as tropes of the destruction of the ancien régime. This was an important moment as penitentiary justice ostensibly changed during the Revolution. For, with the passing of the 1791 Code pénal, incarceration became a sentence-in-itself. 

This talk will explore how revolutionaries approached the question of the ‘révolution pénitentiaire’ (Petit, 1991), assessing the prevalent debates over the definition of penal punishment at the same moment that one’s inviolable right of liberté was heralded. However, this is not a Furetian ‘history without’; this set of carceral legislation and debates developed and was interpreted by individual who ‘lived the revolution’ (McPhee, 2006), outside, through and inside these penal spaces defined by their malleability with their external environments (Abdela, 2019). 

This talk will resultingly focus on the experiences, negotiations, and resistances of two such groups (prisoners and prison guards) who had to respond to changing socio-political circumstances and cultural valences attributed to prisons throughout the Revolution. It was these individuals, some working in the carceral system for years, others briefly incarcerated for weeks, on whom the new penal system was produced, and it is through studying them, in interrelation with the seemingly totemic revolutionary legislation, that one can begin to understand this ad hoc system, and its anticipation of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Leon Hughes is a third-year PhD Researcher at Trinity College Dublin where he researches prisons and the experience of imprisonment during the French Revolution, 1789-1795. He holds a BA in History from the University of Oxford and an MA in Urban History and Cultural Studies from the University of London Institute in Paris (ULIP), funded by the London Studentship and Nathan, Quinn and Esmond Funds. Over the past year he has held positions as a Visiting Researcher in Berlin at the Max Planck Center for the History of Emotions (funded by the DAAD) and as an Invited Research Affiliate back at ULIP. He is currently an ECR at the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute.