Clairvaux Prison was a high-security prison in France, on the grounds of the former Clairvaux Abbey.
Clairvaux Prison was a high-security prison in France, on the grounds of the former Clairvaux Abbey.
Clairvaux Abbey was founded in 1115 by Bernard of Clairvaux. In 1789, during the French Revolution, it became property of the State. In 1808, Napoleon turned it into a prison. [1] A good portion of the abbey's rich library is now housed in the Médiatéque du Grand Troyes (Grand Troyes Media Library).
The initial prisoners were rebellious soldiers. After the collapse of the Paris Commune in 1871, a number of Communards were held there. Revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui spent some time in solitary. It became the largest French penitentiary of the 19th century. [2] Communist militant Guy Môquet was imprisoned there by the Vichy government. [3]
In 1971, two convicts, Claude Buffet and Roger Bontems , took as hostages a nurse, Nicole Comte, and a prison guard, Guy Girardot. Buffet subsequently murdered them. Buffet and Bontems were captured. Bontems, whose defence counsel included Robert Badinter, contended that the murder was Buffet's idea. Buffet said that he wanted death. Both were sentenced to death by the assize court in June 1972 and were guillotined. [4]
On 16 January 2006, several detainees who were serving life sentences in Clairvaux Prison, having each spent from 6 to 28 years in prison, signed a manifesto denouncing the "false" abolition of the death penalty. They declared that it had resulted in a slow and continuous punishment, a death in life. They called for restoration of the death penalty.
The convicts specifically denounced the French Republic which claimed, in accordance with the "advises of the European Council", that the "enforcing of prison sentences... has been conceived not only to protect society and assure the punishment of the convict, but also to favour his amendment and prepare his rehabilitation". They stated, "In reality: everything is for the punishment." [5]
As of 2022, there were forty prisoners held at the facility, but by September 2023 they are expected to be transferred to another prison. [2] The prison shut down in 2023, and the French state aims to sell the property for a conversion into a tourist site. [6] [7]
Clairvaux Abbey was a Cistercian monastery in Ville-sous-la-Ferté, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from Bar-sur-Aube. The abbey was founded in 1115 by Bernard of Clairvaux and was dissolved during the French Revolution. From 1808 to 2023, the grounds were occupied by Clairvaux Prison, a high-security prison. As of 2024, work is in process to make the space available and attractive to tourists.
A guillotine is an apparatus designed for efficiently carrying out executions by beheading. The device consists of a tall, upright frame with a weighted and angled blade suspended at the top. The condemned person is secured with a pillory at the bottom of the frame, holding the position of the neck directly below the blade. The blade is then released, swiftly and forcefully decapitating the victim with a single, clean pass; the head falls into a basket or other receptacle below.
Life imprisonment is any sentence of imprisonment for a crime under which the convicted criminal is to remain in prison for the rest of their natural life. Crimes that result in life imprisonment are considered extremely serious and usually violent. Examples of these crimes are murder, torture, terrorism, child abuse resulting in death, rape, espionage, treason, illegal drug trade, human trafficking, severe fraud and financial crimes, aggravated property damage, arson, hate crime, kidnapping, burglary, robbery, theft, piracy, aircraft hijacking, and genocide.
The penal colony of Cayenne, commonly known as Devil's Island, was a French penal colony that operated for 100 years, from 1852 to 1952, and officially closed in 1953, in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana.
Louis Auguste Blanqui was a French socialist, political philosopher and political activist, notable for his revolutionary theory of Blanquism.
Katorga ) was a system of penal labor in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union.
Robert Badinter was a French lawyer, politician, and author who enacted the abolition of the death penalty in France in 1981, while serving as Minister of Justice under François Mitterrand. He also served in high-level appointed positions with national and international bodies working for justice and the rule of law.
La Santé Prison is a prison operated by the French Prison Service of the Ministry of Justice located in the east of the Montparnasse district of the 14th arrondissement in southern Paris, France at 42 Rue de la Santé. It is one of the most famous prisons in France, with both VIP and maximum security sections.
Papillon is a novel written by Henri Charrière, first published in France on 30 April 1969. Papillon is Charrière's nickname. The novel details Papillon's purported incarceration and subsequent escape from the French penal colony of French Guiana, and covers a 14-year period between 1931 and 1945. While Charrière claimed that Papillon was largely true, modern researchers believe that much of the book’s material came from other inmates, rather than Charrière himself.
"Claude Gueux" is a short story written by Victor Hugo in 1834. It is considered an early example of "true crime" fiction, and contains Hugo's early thoughts on societal injustice which thirty years later he would flesh out in his novel Les Misérables. Charles Carlier, merchant, and editor of the Revue de Paris considered the work to be of such great educational value that he arranged for copies to be sent to all the deputies in France.
Armand Barbès was a French Republican revolutionary and an opponent of the July Monarchy (1830–1848).
Penal labour is a term for various kinds of forced labour that prisoners are required to perform, typically manual labour. The work may be light or hard, depending on the context. Forms of sentence involving penal labour have included involuntary servitude, penal servitude, and imprisonment with hard labour. The term may refer to several related scenarios: labour as a form of punishment, the prison system used as a means to secure labour, and labour as providing occupation for convicts. These scenarios can be applied to those imprisoned for political, religious, war, or other reasons as well as to criminal convicts.
Capital punishment in France is banned by Article 66-1 of the Constitution of the French Republic, voted as a constitutional amendment by the Congress of the French Parliament on 19 February 2007 and simply stating "No one can be sentenced to the death penalty". The death penalty was already declared illegal on 9 October 1981 when President François Mitterrand signed a law prohibiting the judicial system from using it and commuting the sentences of the seven people on death row to life imprisonment. The last execution took place by guillotine, being the main legal method since the French Revolution; Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian citizen convicted of torture and murder on French soil, was put to death in September 1977 in Marseille.
The épuration légale was the wave of official trials that followed the Liberation of France and the fall of the Vichy regime. The trials were largely conducted from 1944 to 1949, with subsequent legal action continuing for decades afterward.
Ecclesiastical prisons were penal institutions maintained by the Catholic Church. At various times, they were used for the incarceration both of clergy accused of various crimes, and of laity accused of specifically ecclesiastical crimes; prisoners were sometimes held in custody while awaiting trial, sometimes as part of an imposed sentence. The use of ecclesiastical prisons began as early as the third or fourth century AD, and remained common through the early modern era.
Charles François de Virotmarquis de Sombreuil was a French Royalist general of the Ancien Régime and French Revolutionary Wars. He rose to become maréchal de camp, hero of the Battle of Rocoux and governor of Les Invalides.
Marie-Louise Giraud was one of the last women to be executed in France. Giraud was convicted in Vichy France and was guillotined for having performed 27 abortions in the Cherbourg area on 30 July 1943. Her story was dramatized in the 1988 film Story of Women directed by Claude Chabrol.
In France, life imprisonment is a punishment of indeterminate length and may last for the remainder of the convict's life. The sentence is the most severe punishment given under French law and it can be imposed by the courts for aggravated murder, treason, terrorism, drug kingpin and other serious felonies resulting in death or involving torture. There is an average of 25 sentences of life imprisonment per year and there are 550 inmates currently jailed for life. Life sentences for crimes other than aggravated murder are rare.
Claude Buffet was a French criminal who was executed along with his accomplice, Roger Bontems (1936–1972), on 28 November 1972 by guillotine at La Santé Prison and buried at Ivry Cemetery. Both men had been convicted of the murders of prison warder Guy Girardot and prison nurse Nicole Comte in 1971, whom they had taken hostage while Buffet was already serving a life sentence in Clairvaux Prison. Robert Badinter was their defence lawyer.
Thierry Lévy was a high-profile French criminal defence lawyer who spent his career in a state of permanent opposition to the French legal establishment. Admitted to the Paris bar in 1969, he went on to appear in a succession of well publicised criminal trials during the ensuing three and a half decades. His father had been a journalist and press proprietor who was not infrequently supportive of nationalist and other right-wing movements. Thierry Lévy's own assessments of the French criminal justice system, which he shared frequently through the print media and, especially during his later years, in television debates, placed him firmly at the liberal-left end of the political spectrum, however. He was a prominent and eloquent backer of the campaign that led to the abolition of the death penalty by Justice Minister Robert Badinter under President Mitterrand in 1981.
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)In the middle of March, 1883, twenty-two of us, who had been condemned to more than one year of imprisonment, were removed in great secrecy to the central prison of Clairvaux.
