Alleged criminal turned escape artist, Henri Charrière collected and told his daring adventures in a best-selling book entitled ‘Papillon’.

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The novel Papillon by Henri Charrière is the type of tale that French writers often yield. Similar to The Count of Monte Cristo or Jean Valjean from Les Misérables, Papillon also daringly escapes from unjust imprisonment. In 1969, Charrière’s story became an immediate bestseller. The author was an ex-convict who chronicled his numerous harrowing escapes from the infamous prison colony in French Guiana. He was nicknamed ‘Papillon’, for the butterfly tattoo on his chest, which became a metaphor for his quest for freedom.

The great escape

Tattooed while in the French navy, Charrière rebelled against naval discipline and evaded further service by amputating his own thumb. In Paris, he descended into a life of petty crime, becoming a notorious safecracker and thief. In 1931, he was arrested – wrongfully, he claimed – for murder. Convicted, he was sentenced to life in the harsh and inhumane prison camps of French Guiana on the South American coast.

Even before he arrived in the tropical outpost, Charrière was focused on escaping from it. In the 11 years he was imprisoned, he made nine escape attempts, the first when he navigated 2,500km in a small boat. Found living with indigenous pearl divers, Charrière was recaptured and thrown into solitary confinement for two years.

After his release from solitary, Charrière attempted numerous getaways, using his natural resourcefulness while hacking through humid, pest-ridden jungles, encountering benevolent lepers and sadistic sentries. His flights for freedom resulted in increasingly cruel treatment from his captors. Charrière was eventually banished to the colony’s notorious stronghold – Devil’s Island – infamous for being inescapable. So many men succumbed to its lethal conditions it was nicknamed the ‘Dry Guillotine”.

Yet escape he did. Charrière drifted over shark-filled seas clinging to a raft made from coconuts. Finding refuge in Venezuela, he eventually made a new life for himself. An adventure novel inspired him to fill 13 student notebooks with his own tales. He mailed them to a French publisher with the words, “Here are my adventures: have a professional write them up”.

A natural bestseller

It turns out, Charrière was a natural born storyteller, and Papillon met instant acclaim, topping the bestseller list for most of 1969. The French government pardoned Charrière’s murder conviction, and he was welcomed home as a folk hero. For some, though, Charrière’s account didn’t ring true. Researchers doggedly followed his supposed footsteps and found inconsistencies on every page. While Charrière claimed Papillon was largely true, investigators believed the book’s material was drawn from other inmates, including one cohort with a damaged digit whose many tattoos included a butterfly. Charrière justified his memory lapses saying, ‘sorry, I didn’t take my typewriter along”.

Charrière died in 1973, the year his book was made into a movie starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. His book had already sold more than five million copies and been translated into 16 languages. The French abandoned their antiquated jail system in 1953.

From France Today Magazine