Henri Charrière

Biography

Early life

Charrière was born on 16 November 1906 at Saint-Étienne-de-Lugdarès, Ardèche, France. He had two older sisters. His mother died when he was ten. In 1923 at seventeen, he enlisted in the French Navy and served for two years. After that, he became a member of the Paris underworld. He later married and had a daughter.

Imprisonment

According to Papillon

The version of his life presented in his semi-biographical novel, Papillon, claimed that Charrière was convicted on 26 October 1931 of the murder of a pimp named Roland Le Petit, a charge that he strongly denied. He was sentenced to life in prison and ten years of hard labour. He had married Georgette Fourel at the town hall of the 1st arrondissement of Paris, on 22 December 1929. (They divorced on 8 July 1930 by decision of the Paris High Court.) After a brief imprisonment at the transit prison of Beaulieu in Caen, France, he was transported in 1933 to the prison of St-Laurent-du-Maroni on the Maroni River, in the penal settlement of mainland French Guiana.

According to the book, he made his first escape on 28 November 1933 and was joined by fellow prisoners André Maturette and Joanes Clousiot, who would accompany him throughout much of his time on the run. 37 days later, the trio were captured by Colombian police near the village of Riohacha, northern Caribbean Region of Colombia, and were imprisoned. Charrière subsequently escaped during a rainy night and fled to the La Guajira Peninsula, where he was adopted by an indigenous tribe. He spent several months living with the natives, but felt that he had to move on, which was a decision he would ultimately regret. After leaving, he was quickly recaptured and sent back to French Guiana to be put into solitary confinement for the next two years.

After his release from solitary confinement, he spent another seven years in prison. During this period he attempted to escape several more times, resulting in increasingly brutal responses from his captors. He stated that he was then confined to Devil's Island, a labour camp (Devil's Island was not a labour camp so much as an internment camp) that, at the time, was notorious for being inescapable. French authorities later released penal colony records that contradicted this amongst other details, Charrière had never been imprisoned on Devil's Island. However, he finally achieved his permanent liberation in 1941 by using a bag of coconuts as a makeshift raft and, riding the tide out from the island, he escaped with another convict. However, his companion drowned in quicksand when they reached the shore of French Guiana.

After meeting up with some escaped Chinese prisoners on the mainland, they bought a boat and sailed to Georgetown, British Guiana. After almost a year, a bored Charrière then joined another group of escaped convicts in a new boat with the intent of reaching British Honduras. However, after sailing into a cyclone, they only managed to reach Venezuela. They were all arrested and sent to a brutal penal settlement in El Dorado, Bolivar State. After a year of imprisonment, Charrière was released with identity papers on 3 July 1944. Five years later he was given Venezuelan citizenship.

According to French records

French records of his life from 1933 to 1944 present a different account: He left the citadel of Saint-Martin-de-Ré on 29 September 1933 aboard the Martinière and landed on 14 October with the status of "transported" to Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni. There was little time left in the transportation camp, as he was assigned as a nursing assistant to the André-Bouron Colonial Hospital, where he saw many inmates returning from the run who told him their escape stories, from which he drew inspiration. This place spared him from the work of logging sites or agricultural concessions that annihilated convicts in a few months. He escaped for the first time on 5 September 1934, but failed in Colombia, a country that returned escaped convicts to France. Judged by the Special Maritime Court, he spent two years in the cells of the St. Joseph's Island Seclusion. Several times transferred, he ended up as chief nurse in an Indochinese camp on the Guyanese mainland, the Cascades forest camp, from which he escaped on the night of 18–19 March 1944, along with four companions.

Later life

After Charrière had served a year's probationary freedom, he was given his total liberty in 1945. He remained in Venezuela and became a naturalized citizen. He married a Venezuelan woman identified as Rita Bensimon. He opened restaurants in Caracas and Maracaibo. He was subsequently treated as a minor celebrity, even being invited frequently to appear on local television programmes. He finally returned to France, visiting Paris in conjunction with the publication of his memoir Papillon (1969). The book sold over 1.5 million copies in France, prompting a French minister to attribute "the moral decline of France" to miniskirts and Papillon. Papillon was first published in the United Kingdom in 1970, in a translation by the novelist Patrick O'Brian. Charrière played the part of a jewel thief in a 1970 film called Popsy Pop directed by the French director Jean Vautrin, and released internationally in English as The Butterfly Affair. He also wrote a sequel to Papillon entitled Banco, in which he describes his life after being released from prison.

In 1970, the French justice system issued a pardon to Charrière for his 1931 murder conviction.

Death

On 29 July 1973, Charrière died of throat cancer in Madrid, Spain.