Embrun 1800-15: la prima maison centrale francese tra imperativi securitari e logiche economiche

Autore: Ludovic Maugué
In: Meridiana. 101, 2021
doi:10.23744/4071
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Abstract

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, deprivation of liberty becomes the main common law penalty, but the majority of prisons fail to meet the most basic requirements of the new prison system (classification of prisoners, health, prison labor). As a response to this situation, the consular government encourages the creation of large penal institutions – the maisons centrales de detention – where prisoners from several departments are centralized, and their work is managed by private contractors. The prefect of the Hautes Alpes took this program into his own hands, setting up a prison factory in 1804 in the former Jesuit seminary of Embrun. Industry, hygiene, public order, sedentarization of floating populations: France’s first maison centrale was intended to remedy the social ills of the department. However, the pioneering establishment was confronted with countless difficulties that bore the seeds of the excesses of the contemporary penitentiary system. Thus, despite its purpose, Embrun remains in practice a hybrid place – between a depot for beggars, a general hospital, a correctional home and a political prison – that the public authorities use to neutralize individuals likely to threaten social stability. Economic, carceral or security rationality: the penal manufacture is thus traversed by contradictory logics that reveal all the difficulties inherent in the specialization of places of confinement at the beginning of the 19th century.

Keywords: Maison centrale de détention; Penal manufacture; Embrun; Empire.