2023-07-28 23:11:37
The story of the French writer Henri Charrière is that of the person impersonated by the character, as described in his two autobiographical works, ‘Papillon’ (1969) and ‘Banco’ (1973). In the first, he recounts his supposed and numerous escape attempts, adventures, escapes, and captures from his imprisonment in 1932 until his final flight to Venezuela, where he lived since 1945, married, and obtained nationality in 1956. In this country, he founded several nightclubs. (‘Gambrinus’, ‘Mi Vaca y Yo’, ‘Ninoska’ and ‘Normandy’), the Capitán Chico Fishing Company and the restaurant ‘Le Grand Café’, in Caracas, where he wrote some memoirs that were reflected in ‘Papillon ‘.
Considered by numerous literary critics as a milestone in French literature, the book contains numerous stories and situations whose veracity was questioned by former prisoners such as Charles Brunier and journalists such as Gerard de Villiers (‘Butterfly nailed’). In 2005, the aforementioned Brunier stated that he was the real Papillon. He was 104 years old and had a butterfly tattoo on his left arm. From this moment on, Charrière’s story was reviewed and it was concluded that some passages in the book were not true, or that he had not starred in them. Furthermore, the French authorities published the records of the Devil’s Island penal colony and Charrière’s name did not appear in them. Gerard de Villiers points out that only 10% of what he tells is true and the latest investigations have revealed that much of the information in his book are stories from other prisoners. In the sequel ‘Banco’, with his entertaining and direct style, he recounts the eventful road traveled from his release from the prison of El Dorado (Venezuela) to his literary consecration.
Charriére, alias Papillon, enlisted in the French Army in 1923, at the age of 17, and two years later he graduated and began to frequent the Parisian underworld. Accused of the murder of the pimp Roland Legrand, known as Roland le Petit, he was sentenced to forced labor on October 26, 1931. He was imprisoned in the Saint Laurent du Maroni Penitentiary Center (French Guiana) and later on Devil’s Island, where he began a vital journey that gave rise to the story contained in the two aforementioned works.
nine leaks
From 1933 to 1945 he went from prison to prison, and tried to escape from all of them seeking his freedom. Nine escapes, the first in 1933 from the André-Bouron colonial Hospital until a year later he was captured and interned on the island of Saint-Joseph, nicknamed the man-eater. Then he passed by Royale Island and lastly by Devil’s Island, the smallest of the Salvation Islands and from which they thought it was impossible to escape due to the strong currents that surrounded it. There he made his ninth escape attempt, in 1941, and after being recaptured he was sent to the Mobile Colonies of El Dorado, where he spent 4 years until he was released on October 18, 1945. Since Venezuela did not have an extradition treaty with France, Charriére decided to stay in Caracas and married Rita Alcover.
Until his case expired in 1967, he remained a fugitive from French justice, and continued in this way until three years later he was pardoned by President Georges Pompidou. He later settled in Spain. Initially in Fuengirola, where he found work as an actor and scriptwriter in the film shot in Venezuela ‘Popsy Pop’, starring Claudia Cardinale, and later in Palma de Mallorca and Marbella. A short time later, on July 29, 1973, 50 years ago, he died in Madrid and was buried in the Lanas cemetery, in Ardéche.
Fiction is full of characters who have to persevere over and over again in order to achieve freedom. Reality also collects similar cases. That Henri Charriére’s is one of them is something we don’t know. Lights and shadows, truths and lies, certainties and doubts are always present in cases like this. Who always defended his innocence and fought for his freedom with courage and bravery, making his escape attempts and his tenacity an epic story, may have lied to us on occasions and exaggerated on others. But what is an indisputable reality is that France deported to its Guyana the convicts and thugs who swarmed its streets and that there, among mosquitoes and palm trees, it buried them alive; that Devil’s Island (used by Napoleon III since 1851 to deport common murderers and political prisoners), forty meters above sea level, with a sweltering climate, perpetual heat and humidity, teeming with vermin, was an atrocious point of the map through which more than eighty thousand unfortunates passed in almost 90 years, of which 40% died the first year of hunger, malaria, poisonous bites and unbearable punishments; that human cruelty and tragedy were the order of the day, accompanied by corruption, pain, prostitution and terror; and that the book denounced to the general public the prison system of the mid-20th century and also the judicial system.
That is why it was a worldwide sales success. Because it collected characteristic and despicable features of human nature that the human being overcomes. In two months and over thirteen ring notebooks, he emptied the sweaty story of a character who claimed to be himself. In an elemental, raw, direct way he filled out those notebooks that he subsequently sent to the French publisher Jean Pierre Castelnau. Starting in 1969, the book ‘Papillon’ sold millions of copies, was translated into twenty-seven languages on four continents and was made into a movie. Citizens, the bourgeoisie and the world of coated paper exalt him as the antihero who rebels against the vengeful machinery of the State and Charrière becomes, from then on, an essential figure in premieres, parties, presentations and soirees. The lived and the imagined had been worth it. Or not?
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