Trivia Cafe
16

French army officer Alfred Dreyfuss and Henri Charriere, author of Papillon, were two of the most famous residents of which penal colony off the coast of French Guiana?

Learn More

history

This infamous penal colony was part of a larger complex on the Îles du Salut (Salvation's Islands) off the coast of French Guiana. While the entire system was often referred to by its most notorious part, the small, rocky Devil's Island was specifically reserved for political prisoners. Its most famous resident was Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894. He spent nearly five years there in brutal solitary confinement, the central figure in a political scandal that deeply divided France before his eventual exoneration.

Decades later, the penal colony gained a different kind of fame through Henri Charrière, nicknamed "Papillon." Convicted of murder, Charrière was held on the neighboring Île Royale, not Devil