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| Some deportees, stomped into their graves in Cayenne. |
Louis-Ange Pitou, Hell's Angel.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789), it became fashionable to deport the many enemies of the Republic to the unfriendly colony of Cayenne (French Guyana) where they dropped like leaves in autumn. Three of these deportees have left the testimony of their exile in hell. Deadly fevers, the plague, the chiques or the dreadful freed Negroes… Welcome to Cayenne!
Read the ARTICLE at Rare Book Hub or RIGHT HERE.
Stomp
them in
PART ONE: Louis-Ange Pitou,
Hell’s Angel.
The Bastille was taken on July 14th, 1789.
Louis-Ange Pitou arrived in Paris three months later, infatuated with the
revolutionary ideas of the time. He had no money, knew no one but he was young
and had ambitions; as well as a good education. The story goes that he
witnessed a terrible scene on his very first day in Paris: a crowd carrying the
severed head of an innocent baker! Pitou was so horrified that he turned
royalist. From that day on, he started to plot against the Republic, joining
dozens of illegal newsletters, becoming a spy and an agitator. His pleasant
manners soon earned him many acquaintances—he even met a grateful Queen
Marie-Antoinette at one point. Now a National Guard, he started to attend many
assemblies of Sans-Culottes (name of
the revolutionaries) as an undercover agent. His brother, who was fighting with
the Royalists in Vendée (West of France), needed arms. Thus, Pitou smuggled
300,000 francs worth of weapons and ammunitions during the summer of 1793! A
perilous activity, that soon cost the life of his brother. Pitou, who lived
many lives in one, then became a chansonnier,
or street singer; behind the church of Saint-Germain, he stood up on a table
and sang songs of protest in front of a numerous and agitated audience; as a
result, he became a jailbird. Everyday the water runs to the well, and after
the failed royalist coup of Fructidor
18th, (September 4th, 1797*) the bottom dropped out; Pitou was sentenced to
deportation to Cayenne alongside a few criminals, a handful of harmless non-juring
priests and many royalist conspirators such as Jean-Pierre Ramel, Pichegru or
Tronçon-Ducoutray. As a traitor and a conspirator, Louis-Ange Pitou deserved
death; but he bribed a few officials, and saved his head—only to end up in
hell, Cayenne (French Guyana).
* The revolutionists adopted a new calendar. Year
1 started on September 22nd, 1792. A worthy piece of information
regarding old books, as much of the publishers of the time adopted the
so-called “new style” on their title pages—hence the numerous mentions of An V de la République (Year 5 of the Republic),
An III, etc.
Field
of ambition, slaughterhouse of deportees
Since 1795, it had become fashionable to send
political prisoners to Cayenne—it was a sure way to get rid of them for quite a
long time, if not forever, while pretending to be magnanimous; you didn’t spill
the blood of your enemies, did you? But as Tronçon-Ducoudray, who met his death
in Cayenne, put it: French Guyana was nothing but a dry guillotine—and it remained active until the 1940s. “This land where we find ourselves,” writes
Pitou, “has always been, since
discovered, the field of ambition, the retreat of the outlaws, the graveyard of
the Africans and the slaughterhouse of the Europeans banned from their country.”
This is an extract from his famous Voyage
à Cayenne... (1805). As the two other books aforementioned, it is
considered as a travel book. The first edition came out in 1805, in two
in-octavo volumes illustrated with two folding plates—the government allegedly
seized a first manuscript of the relation before printing, circa 1800. Though
described as “of little literary interest”
by Philippe Descoux in an article about Louis-Ange Pitou published in Les Contemporains (1901), the book was
successful. When reprinted in 1807, it wasn’t to be found At the author’s anymore, but At
Pitou’s, Bookseller. Indeed, thanks to the benefits generated by the first
edition, he had established himself as a bookseller in Paris, and started to
print his old songs; but he soon went bankrupt. Nowadays, this is a sought-after
book, which won’t go for less than a few hundreds of euros, though usually
modestly bound—this tough economical period was poor in magnificent bindings,
mainly for that type of books. Some of his digressions might be slightly
boring, but there are not so many, and as soon as he comes back to his personal
testimony, his book gets fascinating. Arrested in Paris, he was sent to the
prison of Bicêtre: “I was thrown among the
worst villains ever, who robbed me of everything, up to my shirt (...), telling me I’d better keep quiet if I didn’t
want to get murdered that night. I shut up, but cried at will.” His book
takes us into the belly of the beast; at one point, he’s given a shirt with a
hole: “The shirt belonged to one of the
poor victims murdered here two years before (the famous massacre of 1792,
as he apparently mixes up his first encounters with the law and his final
condemnation); the hole had been made by
the sword that had been driven into his stomach!” Thrown into a cell full
of lepers, he writes: “Some worms as thick
as my finger fell from the living corpses above me, who were up to four on the
same mattress.” Transferred to the Conciergerie, he stayed there long
enough to catch a glimpse at a scary chest, “were they had stocked the hair of the victims put to death the previous
day*.” And this was just the beginning!
* The executioner cut the hair of the victims so
that the blade of the guillotine would meet as less resistance as possible.
Stomp
them in
Louis-Ange Pitou was carried to
Cayenne aboard the frigate La Décade
(Aymé, of whom we shall talk in another article, sailed aboard La Charente, and Ramel aboard the
corvette La Vaillante); he reached
there in June 1798. And his first impression was a terrible one: “Some avid eyes are staring at
us... O my God, what beings! Are they men or beasts?” At the time, only 800
people lived in Cayenne. They were more than 15,000 in 1763! The plague and
other diseases had sent them all to the grave. An unfriendly territory, indeed;
full of dreadful... insects! The chiques
would dwell under your feet nails to devour your flesh; if not treated, their
wounds led to amputation and death. The gouty’s
lice, a red vermin that loved creeping under your skin, “was to be found by the thousands on any blade of grass”; the
crocodiles would catch every dog they could, and the vampire bats that caught
you sleeping left you in a pool of blood. As our author says: “What a place!” But things are never so
bad that they can’t be made worse. Soon, Pitou was sent to another part of
Guyana, Konanama, under the “care” of Director Prevost, and the head
storekeeper Beccard. In their case, to administer the place meant exploiting
the prisoners by any means necessary. The change was so brutal that some
committed suicide: one Sourzac suddenly jumped into the nearby river, and one
Brunégat simply walked straight ahead until he met his death. But even in
Cayenne, Man remained the most dangerous animal.
The recently freed Negroes who were supposed to
take care of the deportees actually charged them for every thing, and let the
poorest ones to die helplessly. They even refused to bury them—buried by his Belgian fellowmen, as the
Negroes refused to do so, wrote Beccard beside the name of a dead priest
(Pitou). “They laugh at all this mess,”
writes Pitou, “and say, in their own
language: We right fi steal the white people-them; Freedom gi wi de right.”
In order to collect more money from burials, they rushed their work. Beside the
name of Chapuis, another dead non-juring priest listed in Pitou’s work, we can
read: “He was among those whom the
Negroes stomped into their graves.” This particular event deeply affected
Pitou, who dedicated a plate of his book to it. It shows the Negroes hastily
burying some dead deportees; in the background, Beccard and Prevost, rejoice
and dance with some female Negroes. The caption quotes Aymé’s book: “The undertakers have been seen breaking the
legs of the dead, stomping them into too narrow and too short a grave. They
acted this way to rush to another victim.”
Yet Pitou held no personal grudge—he wrote:
“After the attempted coup of
Fructidor 18th, the Directoire showed no mercy, and threw us upon this island,
granting us a shadow of justice only (...). Beccard and Prevost (...) will be
less guilty, if we dare scrutinizing the human heart. Their fierceness is a
local crime they might have avoided had the deportees been less numerous, and
hadn’t the bone of contention embittered both sides (...). The Negroes weren’t
involved in all these crimes. They are manlike creatures that freedom has
turned into mean tigers. (...) In a word, they’re wasting their freedom.” Pitou
blames the system more than the individuals. After all, Beccard became “half-mad with drinking and pain” himself,
before perishing in 1799, “in terrible
convulsions.”
Cannibals
As the title of his book reads, Pitou rubbed
elbows with some cannibals while in Guyana. Sent to dry the morasses of La Franche, another deadly “desert”, he eventually mingled with a
tribe of Indians, observing them and sharing their lifestyle for quite a
while—but one day, they were attacked by a bunch of cannibals. “Lord! This is no battle, or slaughter; this
is something even worse. Each winner takes his victim with him, tears him apart
just like a lion revenging against the hunter who has hurt him.” Meanwhile
in France, another type of cannibals was at work; Napoléon took over the
Directoire on November 9th, 1799 (18 Brumaire) and pardoned the deportees. As
Louis-Ange Pitou finally sailed away from Cayenne, he seemed to hear the voice
of the martyrs he was leaving behind: “Thus,
you’re leaving this place where our ashes rest in peace! Tell our families to
forgive our enemies; we were 329 upon our arrival, half of us were sent to the
grave in the twinkle of an eye. Carry our names to France and don’t forget
you’re leaving in those deserts some companions of hardship...” Upon his
arriving in Paris, Pitou learnt the death of his beloved one; “From that day on, his life will be nothing
but a difficult and unfortunate struggle against fortune,” writes Philippe
Descoux. Sent back to prison for a few months, he was eventually pardoned; he
then remained far from politics until the restoration of the Monarchy; he then
tried to publish a “heavy and hard to
digest composition without sense” (Descoux) about the Stuarts and the
Bourbons, but the unexpected return of Napoleon put an end to the project. When
Louis XVIII came back for the second time, Pitou was granted a pension of 2,100
francs; but he expected more, and he wrote dozens of inappropriate letters to
the King. At the end of his life, “his
intelligence has darkened” (Descoux), and he paid the price of his “stupid stubbornness” until being reduced
to begging to survive. He died on May 8th, 1846, in the middle of an unfriendly
“desert” of France, far from those in Guyana, where he had obviously left a
part of himself—the angel had come
out alive from the fiery furnace, but not intact.
Writers
Our three authors were arrested after the coup of
Fructidor 18th, and then deported together to Cayenne; but they sailed in three different boats, and didn’t spend much time
together, as it seems. Louis-Ange was just a street singer while Aymé was a
former politician, and Ramel an officer in the French army. Pitou talks about
Aymé in his book, who only lists him among the deportees as a 30 years-old singer in return. Aymé
sends the reader to Ramel’s book to learn about the pains endured by the
deportees of Sinamary. But Ramel talks about neither Pitou nor Aymé. On the
contrary, they all mention Tronçon-Ducoudray, who ruined his health in anger
and discontent. On one hand, Pitou claims he died from a putrid fever in May
1798: “He stubbornly refused to drink
some turtle stock that would have saved him inevitably.” But on the other
hand, he writes beside his name: Dead of
sorrow. A sort of dry death.
© Thibault Ehrengardt
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