It was possible to join societies that would guarantee to send a member to one’s burial to listen for signs and sounds of vitality

Cleaning up a corner of my library, moving stacks of books around, I come across Citizens A Chronicle of the French Revolution by Simon Schama which I pulled out to read sometime this past year and still have not done so.

As is my wont, a book can't really pass through my hands without at least a cursory glance at the text. My eye falls on the following paragraph:

The 1780s were the great age of prison literature. Hardly a year went by without another contribution to the genre, usually bearing the title The Bastille Revealed (La Bastille Dévoilée) or some variation. It used the standard Gothic devices of provoking shudders of disgust and fear together with pulse-accelerating moments of hope. In particular, as Monique Cottret has pointed out, it drew on the fashionable terror of being buried alive. This was such a preoccupation in the late eighteenth century (and not only in France) that it was possible to join societies that would guarantee to send a member to one’s burial to listen for signs and sounds of vitality and to insure against one of these living entombments.

In what was by far the greatest and deservedly the most popular of all the anti-Bastille books, Linguet’s Memoirs of the Bastille, the prison was depicted as just such a living tomb. In some of its most powerful passages Linguet represented captivity as a death, all the worse for the officially extinguished person being fully conscious of his own obliteration.

Linguet’s memoir burned with the heat of personal betrayal. He had, he said, been lured back to France in 1780 from England, where he had been publishing his Annales Politiques, on the express understanding that he would, in effect, be immune from prosecution. Almost as soon as he returned, he was whisked off to the Bastille because of his attack on the Maréchal Duras. His account of the physical conditions he endured is far more harrowing than anything experienced by Morellet, Marmontel or de Sade and is not altogether borne out by the Bastille archives. But there is no reason to assume he lied when he wrote of “two mattresses eaten by worms; a cane chair of which the seat had but a few strings holding it together, a folding table… two china pots, one to drink from, and two paving stones to hold a fire.” (Some time later the warders brought him some fire irons and tongs – though not, he complained, brass dogs.) His worst moments came when the eggs of mites and moths hatched out and all his bed and personal linen was transformed into “clouds of butterflies.

I have just finished an account of the War of 1812 as well as a couple of books on the American Revolution.

One of the striking things was the inhumanity and appalling conditions of prisoners imprisoned for the duration of the war. The British prison hulks were perhaps the worst but closely rivaled by the somewhat different barbarism of Dartmoor in England. If I recall correctly, more Americans died of privation and disease in British prison hulks and prisons than died on the battlefield of the war.

1750-1775 was the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment so it is not especially surprising to see a manifested interest in prison reform in 1780. What is astonishing is how relatively little progress any of the developed nations have made in the intervening nearly quarter millennia (240 years).

Lot's of ideas and yet little progress. It took forever just to get to halfway humane physical conditions. In terms of reform and reintegration, it seems like there has been hardly in progress for all the thinking, writing, proposing, and experimental implementations.