Question

Why france was called political prison

Answer 1

1Creating a dossier about political detentions in France implies addressing a particularly difficult subject in the history of penal justice. It implies redefining numerous criteria, since the line that distinguishes common law from political law oscillates as political regimes change. When a penitentiary regime labels an infraction, a judicial body or a prisoner as “political”, it provokes a certain attention to the motives behind the transgression of the law. This attention to the motives of the crime is not constant. A certain government in a certain time period can have such a suspicion of the (potentially political) motives of a crime, which can then be questioned by that government’s successors. The “cause” behind political transgressions, the engagement in defending certain ideas, can gain the support and even a certain unanimity in public opinion, but it can also be the subject of very limited support by a fraction of society. This motive can provoke debates, divergent opinions, combats and battles between prisoners, lawyers, and politicians, as well as conflicts between schools of legal theory. In France, this phenomena contains many paradoxes. The governments that have come to power since the 18th century have never been able to offer a stable definition of political crime, preferring to label certain infractions as “crimes de lèse majesté”, crimes against the State, crimes against national security and crimes of terrorism. Moreover, the French state has been content to refer to public opinion to qualify certain crimes and lesser infractions, labeling them as “reputed as political” or “called political” (“dits politiques”). Legal experts, members of parliament, ministers and highly-ranked civil servants in the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice have frequently been required to refer to public opinion to try to define the boundaries of this unique type of criminality. Thus, “political” crimes have traditionally been defined by the tension between levels of public tolerance, which have evolved over time, and the acquiescence, or refusal, of the specific regime in power. The fate of the rural, catholic inhabitants of the Vendée who followed the Duchess of Berry in her crazed adventures in the beginning of the July Monarchy illustrate this ambiguity. Those who were arrested during the first years of Louis-Philippe’s reign were placed in the political section, created by Adolphe Thiers, of the Fontevrault prison. In later years, the perpetrators of similar acts were placed with common law prisoners. Those who attempted to take, or who took, the lives of kings (accused of regicide) were not all treated in the same way by the penitentiary system either. The fact that they were placed in a particular part of the prison, with a special detention protocol, was thus the defining factor of a certain status (political prisoner) that the law itself did not provide or explicitly define. When individuals were accused of acts threatening national security, the courts made choices in a similar fashion.