"In February 1819 the French government established a committee to consider the question of sending prisoners overseas to a penal colony. In part its action stemmed from the increase in the number sentenced to deportation for political reasons after the colony. In part its action stemmed from the increase in the numbers sentenced to deportation for political reasons after the Restoration. It was claimed that between 1815 and 1817 the Minister of the Navy had been unsuccessful in a search for a satisfactory penal site, so that political offenders were perforce imprisoned in France. But pressure built up quickly for a penal colony as a solution not only to problems for the navy in administering the growing number of forçats in the bagnes, but also to more general problems associated with prisons in France. Indicative of this growing sentiment is a fifty-page memoir by M. Forestier, dated 14 October 1816. Forestier was an important bureaucrat, a Councillor of State of the Committee of the Navy and Colonies and later an influential member of the 1819 Committee. In his memoir he raised most of the issues around which debate would focus for decades.
Forestier began by drawing on Blackstone, 'the most learned jurist in England', to the effect that modern criminal laws should have as their aim 'to reform the offender, to remove his means of relapsing into crime and by his example to keep in check his fellows'. In these developments he considered that England had gone far: 'Nearly all the crimes which involve the death penalty, are punished by deportation. A new continent offers the convicts a new homeland, a new life, hopes of fortune and prospects of pardon'. At the same time the colony would grow and prosper. Contrast this with France where the prisons and bagnes were costly, produced little work and were schools of crime from which prisoners emerged more dangerous than when they entered. It was therefore necessary, Forestier concluded, 'to follow England's example and found a colony for deportation. Justice, morality and good policy demand this establishment, and when so many interests tend towards the sa same goal they should be speedily satisfied'. Such a colony should also be open to free migration, and the more it was examined the more necessary it was to 'render homage to the excellence of the English system of colonisation'."
- Colin Forster, France and Botany Bay: The Lure of a Penal Colony. Melbourne: University of Melbourne Press, 1996. p. 14-15.
[It's interesting comparing this book - about half of its 200 pages devoted to the debates on penal transportation in France, to the two pages devoted to this debate, out of 500, in Jean-Claude Vimont's study of 'la prison politique' in late 18th and early 19th century France.]
