The word is pleasant, cruel reality: Biribi designated the “ punitive archipelago “That the French army had organized on the land of Africa to punish rebellious soldiers and other” strong heads » – Or nearly a million men between 1830 and 1960. Practicing a history that is both cultural, prison and colonial, Dominique Kalifa highlights the horror of these places of exile and suffering.
After studying the crime, the police and the judicial investigation at the XIXe Century, Dominique Kalifa addressed another side of French criminal history here, as a side that we did not want to see, known as Biribi. Biribi, as the author reminds us, is a generic name given to the many disciplinary and penitentiary structures of the French army, installed in North Africa, which was called in military language “ special body And who, under the pen of journalists, became the military convicts. The disciplinary companies, created in 1818, first aimed to bring together the “ unruly “,” evil spirits ” Or “ strong heads “, Including” autumutiles », To dismiss them from the units and better punish them. First confined to metropolitan territory, these companies were, from 1830, moved to North Africa. In addition, over time, military prisons, penitentiaries, the “ Public works workshops Or the special colonial companies receiving the soldiers sentenced by the war councils. From the military law of 1889, a stage towards a compulsory military service, Biribi also drains young French people condemned by the courses of assizes and who, although deemed unworthy to bear arms, are incorporated at the end of their sentence.
Spaces of relegation and suffering
Biribi is an expression referring to a multiplicity of military penitentiary and disciplinary institutions that were disseminated in various points of North Africa and first in Algeria, following the conquest. The term would come from an Italian game of chance, but it only appears to be the symbol of the military prison in 1861, in The 13the Hussar Emile Gaboriau. It was mainly popularized in 1890 thanks to the book Biribi by Georges Darien who, denouncing the violence and the torture endured by the soldiers punished, provokes the opening of debates in the chamber directed against these places of suffering. The denunciation was taken up by journalists in the following years, until the terrible reports of Albert London in 1924. She was relayed by the anti -militarist, trade unionist and anarchist press who sees her activists or sympathizers particularly affected by the punitive thunders of the hierarchy military. The denunciation makes Biribi known in France and is gaining momentum in the first half of the XXe century, but it was not until 1962 and the end of French Algeria for the system to dislocate. A single disciplinary company will be reconstituted in Savoy to finally be dissolved in 1972.
Biribi covers a multiplicity of places, but the name is closely associated with North Africa and more particularly in Algeria. It is on these Algerian lands that we first install this “ punitive archipelago »(To use Dominique Kalifa’s words), before expanding the locations in Morocco and Tunisia in the last years of XIXe century. The military enrollment exploded after the passage of the military recruitment law of July 15, 1889 and, with them, the number of “ punished ». These are dispatched to the special bodies, then put to the test in the Bat’d’Af, who also receive offenders sentenced to correctional sentences. North Africa thus meshes a network of penitentiaries and “ public workshops And inaugurates a criminal policy which designs the use of certain colonial spaces as places of relegation, work, suffering, repentance and repeatation: Algeria, New Caledonia and Guyana. The military and civil condemned succeeded each other in Algeria until the 1850s, but the 1854 transportation law decides that the fate of the civil condemned will be played in New Caledonia and Guyana to make the “ most harsh work in colonization ». Algerian history remains intimately linked to the African army and especially to its special bodies. Punished men do not fight ; They build works, fortifications, buildings and other colonial infrastructure.
Antimilitarists, Corsicans and Senegalese
Dominique Kalifa offers us a remarkably documented story of this “ punitive archipelago “, His public denunciations, his internal organization, with the precise description of this long -term system which lasted more than a century and a half and drained some 800,000 men between 1830 and 1960. From drunkenness to homosexuality, “” rant “And self -control to” subversive ideas Or politically radical, the reasons are numerous and varied to enter the special bodies, from which the individual is taken very difficult to take place in a lacis of successive institutions and sorrows which often lead him to bother in this earth of “ African sufferings ».
The study of these prison worlds is meticulously conducted from the inside, until the description of intimate hierarchies between convicted people and nocturnal violence. The abuse that the authority inflicts are also precisely described, and this authority can have several faces, the non-commissioned officer, the subordinate soldier, often Corsican and dreaded. But it is sometimes Senegalese or other native soldiers, who then reactivate an ordinary racism, formidably violent among the mistreated men. The union newspapers or anarchists, couples of the army, are not the last to take offense at the occupied function in Biribi by the native soldiers, “ negroes ” Or “ Arabs “, Supervisor and harsh French soldiers and, among them, activists and anti -militarists.
The study offered by Dominique Kalifa completes the knowledge that we had about the organization, operation and composition of French convicts XIXe And XXe century, whose special bodies are obviously a particular category. We recognize here a “ system “, Marked by abuses, sadism, violence, psychic and physical mistreatment, as well as by his” Us and customs “: The expression of virility, tattoos on bodies, rules organizing” caste Internal, the manipulations of the exercise of power by military order. The resemblances are so disturbing that the men of Biribi themselves can hope to be finally shipped to Guyana, as their condemnation: they indeed think that it is easier to escape.
The approach remains rigorously centered on the analysis of the system as such, the condition of the men who undergo it, the denunciations which are born in mainland France. Few things, on the other hand, are said on the effects of these penitentiary institutions in Algeria. One could, however, reflect further on the consequences that the presence of such a strong density of punitive and military institutions on Algerian soil and in colonial society of time. One could reflect on the links existing between these institutions and the Bat’d’Af, as well as on the specificities of an army of Africa whose influence was deep in colonial Algeria.
Finally, we can hypothesize that these penance institutions, here military, elsewhere civil, in Guyana or New Caledonia, have deeply marked the territories and the societies that welcomed them. The particular violence they cover, the standards and habitus they depict, the necessities of surveillance and control that they require, have worked specificly local colonial social configurations far beyond visible or invisible walls who entered the condemned. This would amount to thinking about “ Military prison Not as such and for themselves, but in colonial context and in their short, medium and long term effects. There is an invitation to continue the Dominique Kalifa’s investigation into the lines of a social history of the Algerian territory under French colonization.