The "bagnards" of Brest

On Monday I and some French-speaking ladies were at the home of Danielle whose relatives live in Brittany, and who talked to us about the city of Brest. Here's some of what I learned.

In 1859 the last ship to carry convicts from Brest in France set sail, bound for French Guiana. There's no longer a trace of the stone edifice that held 60,000 such prisoners in Brittany at one time or another between 1749 and 1859.  The régime of Louis XIV sentenced criminals (and some not so criminal) to the "galleys," galères––to forced labour, la chiourme––in order to make the regular prisons less crowded. In 18th / 19th century France and England forced labour and penal transportation was the order of the day. Convicts did their best to escape from the bagne de Brest, usually in vain.

A chaque fois qu'un forçat s'évadait, on faisait tonner le canon pour alerter les habitants. Le canon s'entendait à 20 km à la ronde, d’où l'expression favorite du capitaine Haddock: "Tonnerre de Brest!"

The prison was a huge structure with unscalable walls and panoptic lookout towers. In its day it was considered modern and less severe than other prisons; it had running water and allowed the inmates palliasses to sleep on. The convicts made up a good 10% of Brest's population."On avait des moments libres" when the galley slaves were not labouring and their sad little works of art have lasted longer than the prison walls, it seems, such as sculptures made out of coconuts, as have some of the letters sent to their relatives, informing them abruptly that their family members had been dispatched to the penal colonies across the Atlantic.

Jacques Prévert wrote a poem, Chasse à l'enfant, about a child convict (some were under 13) who tried to escape from a penal colony on Belle-Ile-en-Mer and was hunted down... in the 20th century. That wasn't the Bagne de Brest, but like it. Prévert was thinking of Brest though, when he wrote one of his most famous poems, Barbara.

Brest is mostly famous for its military port, still France's main nuclear submarine base, and the centre of terrible confrontations in both the 1st and 2nd World Wars, but also for its connection with François Frézier, who introduced France to white strawberries. Nearby Plougastel is still known as the Pays des Fraises.