A Comparative Study of French Transportation in Guyana and in New Caledonia, XIXth-XXth century
Résumé
The paper puts into comparative historical perspective the two main French penal
colonies, Guyana (1852-1938) and New Caledonia (1863-1897). Each has contributed in
its own distinct way to the long history of French transportation beginning in the XIXth
century. New Caledonia embodied the rural utopia of the 1854 law on transportation. It
was based on hope in a convict’s rehabilitation through access to land and farm work.
New Caledonia’s experiment was short-lived, lasting only 34 years, and concerned
around 30,000 convicts but had a major impact on the making of the local colonial
society. On the other hand, penal transportation to Guyana which lasted more than 90
years and involved around 79 000 convicts played a central role in the repressive
policies of the Second Empire and the Third Republic. It impacted Guyana itself through
the massive building of camps and the heavy presence of convict workers and
impoverished ex-convicts alongside other migrants and the local population. But most of
the convicts sent to Guyana died or left the colony before or after the Second World
War. In Guyana, transportation has left behind many material traces, but few
descendants and the memory of the penal past is not fully embraced. In New Caledonia,
however, the transportees and their descendants were numerous enough to mark the
territory and New Caledonian society as the whole. The idea here is to reexamine French
penal transportation’s history through its variations and its legacies in Guyana and New
Caledonia.