La Santé Prison

La Santé prison in the 19th century as photographed by Charles Marville.

The architect Joseph Auguste Émile Vaudremer built the prison, which was inaugurated on 20 August 1867.[1]

The prison is located on the site of a former coal market and replaced the Madelonnettes Convent in the 3rd Arrondissement, which had been used as a prison since the French Revolution. Previously, on the same site, was a Maison de la santé (House of Health), built on the orders of Anne of Austria and transferred in 1651 to what is now the Sainte-Anne Hospital Center.

In 1899, after the closure and demolition of the prison Grande Roquette, convicts were transferred to La Santé either to await transfer to the Prison of St-Laurent-du-Maroni in French Guiana or to await execution. Initially, there were 500 cells in La Santé, which was increased to 1,000 cells in 1900. The cells are 4 metres long, 2.5m wide and 3m high. The prison has a total capacity of as many as 2,000 prisoners, divided into 14 divisions.

With executions having previously been performed at the entrance to Grande Roquette, it was decided to do something similar at La Santé. The guillotine was erected at the corner of the Rue de la Santé and the Boulevard Arago, on the pavement. The first execution – and the first in Paris for ten years – occurred on 6 August 1909. It was for Georges Duchemin, who had been convicted of parricide.[2]

On 7 May 1932, Eugene Boyer, a 27-year-old criminal who was denied a presidential pardon the previous day by President Paul Doumer, was to be executed by guillotine. Doumer was assassinated the day the execution was scheduled: in France, the president could reverse his decision until the last moment and obviously Boyer could not benefit from this potential "ultimate mercy", so the execution was cancelled "in extremis" (twenty minutes before the time scheduled). He was finally pardoned by Albert Lebrun on 13 May – which respected the tradition of pardoning those sentenced to death the first time in the presidential office – and he was sent to prison in Guiana. He was referred to as André Baillard in the book by Henri Charrière.

Nearly forty prisoners ended their lives in this place. It was also at this site that the second-last public execution in France was performed, for burglar and double murderer Max Bloch on 2 June 1939. Fifteen days later on 17 June, Eugen Weidmann, guilty of six murders, was guillotined in front of Versailles prison and on 24 June the decision was made to ban public executions. In the same decision, the death penalty was made dependent on the Court of Appeal of Seine (either Seine-et-Oise or Aube), with prisoners executed inside Prison de la Santé.

On 15 March 1940, the Vocoret brothers, who killed three policemen in Issy-les-Moulineaux, were the first criminals to be guillotined inside the prison.

During the German Occupation of France, in addition to common law criminals, there were also executions of 18 Resistance fighters and communists. Nine of them were guillotined between August 1941 and July 1942. The other nine were shot on 30 April 1944. They are memorialized by a plaque affixed to the wall of the prison at the corner of Rue Jean-Dolent and Rue de la La Santé.

Plaque in memory of the 18 resistance fighters executed here.

After the Liberation of France, only common criminals were executed in the courtyard of the prison (except for several FLN activists between 1958 and 1960). Those executed included Marcel Petiot in 1946, Marquis Alain de Bernardy de Sigoyer in 1947, Emile Buisson ("Public Enemy No. 1") in 1956, Jacques Fesch in 1957, and Georges Rapin, known as "Mr. Bill", in 1960.

The last death sentences by guillotine at La Santé were those of Roger Bontems and Claude Buffet. They were the authors of an escape attempt with hostage-taking that ended with the death of the hostages in 1971. Sentenced to death at Troyes on 29 June 1972, they were executed on the following 28 November.

According to them, those sentenced to death who were from the Île-de-France region were locked in Fresnes Prison (which from 1978 would become the only prison permitted to host executions) but neither were executed due to the eventual abolition of the death penalty. The last two remaining guillotines in France are now stored in the basement of the National Centre for Guidance in Fresnes prison.

In 2000, the chief doctor of the prison, Véronique Vasseur, published a book in which she denounced the very poor imprisonment conditions. The book was a shock to the public and prompted parliamentary evaluation of the situation.[3] In 2014, the prison closed for renovations, which required 5 years to complete [4]

The prison features a hub-and-spoke design similar to that which had been implemented previously for the construction of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. The prison is surrounded by:

• Boulevard Arago to the north.
• Rue Messier to the west.
• Rue Jean-Dolent to the south.
• Rue de la Santé to the east.

One of the peculiarities of la Santé is that, until 2000, inmates were divided by geographic origin and ethnicity within the prison. One group of prisoners (those who are studying in particular) are grouped separately but most of them were arranged in four blocks: Block A: Western Europe Block B: Black Africa Block C: North Africa Block D: rest of the world.

These blocks have undergone substantial renovation since 2000. The prison was partially closed from 2014 until 2019 in order to be rehabilitated; the parole section, however, was kept in operation during this time.[5]

Prison de la Santé is now the last intra-muros prison in Paris. The other large prisons (in all categories) dependent on Paris are Poissy, Fleury-Mérogis, Fresnes, and Melun.

• 
  Main entrance of the Prison at 42 rue de la Santé.
• 
  North face of the La Santé Prison, taken from Boulevard Arago.

• Jacques Hillairet, Historical Dictionary of the Streets of Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985, ISBN 2707310549, Vol. 2, p. 503 (in French)

• Dominique Vasseur, Chief Doctor at La Santé Prison, ISBN 2-253-15173-4 (in French)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Prison de la Santé.

• La Santé - Etablissement pénitentiaire - maison d'arrêt - Ministry of France (in French)