The chart below shows the population of French Guiana from 1500 to 2025. A few interesting features should immediately strike you. First, there is an enormous drop in population from year 1500 (red column) to the next available data point in 1807. Second, the population of French Guiana barely rises for nearly two hundred years between 1807 and 1982. Third, there has been a population explosion over the past four decades, which makes this period distinctly different from the preceding centuries. This blog is about the odd history of French Guianese demography; what made it so distinct and what lessons does it hold for us today?
Population of French Guiana 1500-2025 (Source: here)
Spanish explorers first arrived on the coastline we today call French Guiana in the year 1500. In that year, there were an estimated 100,000 indigenous people living in the territory. However, already by the time Cayenne was founded in 1624, the indigenous population had declined significantly and by the time of the first population census of 1807 there were only 1,000 indigenous people left, a decline of 99%. The causes of this collapse were the same as elsewhere in South America: disease, murder, and suicide in preference to enslavement (See here)
In the 1760s, the French government made a concerted effort to populate the territory with French people. In 1763, somewhere between 10,000 to 12,000 Frenchmen and women packed their bags and joined the so-called Kourou Expedition. They had all been sold a pack of lies about paradise and gold. They settled in Kourou, a town on the coast, west of Cayenne, near the present-day Space Centre.
A woman chillaxes at the mouth of the Mahury River near Kourou (Source: own photo)
The Kourou expedition was a disaster. Within a year, half of the new arrivals had died of fevers and other illnesses. In the end, only 2,000 survived. The survivors were those who fled in desperation to the so-called ‘Devil Islands’, a group of three islands some ten nautical miles offshore from Kourou. The islands were promptly renamed îles du Salut, or ‘Salvation Islands’, because they were free of mosquitoes due to constant wind (See here)
Unable to establish a population of French people, the French turned to importating slaves from West Africa. Already by 1700, a total of 2,546 slaves had arrived, but numbers rose to 13,644 in the 18th century and rose again to 14,389 in the 19th Century (See here). By the middle of the 18th Century, there were 10 times as many slaves as Europeans in French Guiana. Still, the population of the territory barely changed, because the conditions under which the slaves lived and toiled were so awful.
Then the French Revolution happened.
By 1848, France finally got around to abolishing slavery. The former slaves immediately fled into the forest to make new lives for themselves along the lines they had known in West Africa. To this day, it is estimated that nearly 100,000 descendants of Maroons still live in the forest, one third of the entire population of French Guiana.
The loss of slaves plunged official French Guiana into an existential crisis; without people to work the plantations and the infrastructure the colony would collapse in short order. To prevent this from happening, in 1850 France brought several shiploads of Indians, Malays, and Chinese to work the plantations, but these people refused the toil and opted instead to set up shops in the main towns.
Then Emperor Napoleon III came up with the idea of shipping French convicts to French Guiana; enter the Penal Era.
As early as 1852, the French government began to send convicts to the territory. French Guiana eventually became a proper penal colony, just like Australia was for the British. While Devil’s Island, one of the three islands of îles du Salut, was made famous by Henri Charrière in his novel “Papillon” (see here), the islands were in fact only a small part of the prison system in French Guiana. The headquarter were based in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni in the western part of the country, while the prison camps were dotted across the entire colony as shown below.
Prison complexes across the penal colony of French Guiana (Source: here)
On 30 May, 1854, the French parliament passed the “Law on Transportation”, which formalised the modalities for the operation of the penal colony. ‘Transportees’ were assigned the heaviest work-loads, such as plantation work, roadbuilding, construction, and clearing land. In 1880, Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni was officially made a ‘prison commune’. A total of 52,905 transportees arrived in French Guiana between 1852 and 1945.
As the idea of the prison colony caught hold in France, new categories of prisoners were approved for transportation. On 27 May, 1885, so-called ‘relegates’ began to arrive. They were repeat-offenders, often petty criminals. A total of 17,372 of these unfortunates eventually ended up in French Guiana.
In the 1890s, France gradually became more conservative and so began to regard prison as punishment rather the rehabilitation. This meant conditions for the convicts in French Guiana got tougher. Article 6 of the Law on Transportation was amended to introduce “doublage”, which was a rule that required transportees sentenced to less than eight years of hard labour to remain in French Guiana for an equivalent time period after the completion of their prison sentence. Those with sentences longer than eight years were required to remain in the colony for the rest of their lives. The new rules were clearly designed to prevent the convicts from returning to France, in order to keep up the population of French Guiana.
Two additional categories of deportees were introduced. Law of 9 February 1895 designated the penitentiary of the Îles du Salut to receive political prisoners of which Captain Alfred Dreyfus, imprisoned on the Devil’s Island from March 1895 to June 1899, was the most famous. A total of 2,816 political prisoners eventually served time in the penal colony. A fourth category - “colonial réclusionnaires” – were prisoners from other French colonies and ultimately numbered about 1,500.
Devil's Island (Source: own photo)
Thus, some 70,000 convicts served time in French Guiana, more than twice the number of African slaves. Remarkably, despite their large numbers, the convicts barely made an impression on the population of the colony. As had been for the case for African slaves, the conditions proved too deadly for the convicts too. In fact, fewer than 10% of prisoners in the penal colony survived, and in some bad years, such as the mid-1940s and early 1950s, the annual death rate among prisoners was close to 50%.
Saint-Joseph Island, where prisoners were held in silent solitary confinement for up to five years. They were not allowed to sit down from 6am to 6pm (Source: own photos)
It is noteworthy that the penal colony of French Guiana was established just four years after end of slavery. The convicts were basically replacements for slaves. The penal system had to be self-financing, so the colony was run like a business. In reality, the penal colony never broke even, but the constant pressure on officials to balance the books meant convicts were pressed to work extra hard and they received poor food, almost no medical care, and lived in terrible accommodation. Moreover, unlike the British penal colony of Australia, the convicts in French Guiana were never taught skills, so they had no means of surviving after they were released; most quickly became destitute and perished.
On the wall in the church on Îles Royale hangs a particularly cynical painting depicting the biblical fable of the Return of Prodigal Son. The painting was meant to instill in the prisoners the message that their punishment would eventually end and lead to their redemption, but in reality, for the vast majority of convicts, there was only death. The painting is a French Guianese version of the Arbeit Macht Frei sign that hangs above the entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
'Arbeit macht frei'- French Guiana style (Source: own photo)
In 1923, investigative journalist Albert Londres published a damning expose of conditions in the penal colony. The French parliament became increasingly aware of the poor finances of the colony. In 1933, the Salvation Army took aim at the miserable conditions for prisoners after release due to “doublage”. Gaston Monnerville, the deputy in the French parliament for French Guiana, also became very outspoken. In 1938, France finally abolished transportation. In 1945, relegation was also banned. However, the last convict did not leave French Guiana until August 1953, because the Vichy regime halted all attempts to close penal colony during World War II.
The Devil Island has an ugly history, but nature is awesome (Source: own photos)
The closure of the penal colony in French Guiana turned out to be a pivotal moment for the territory’s population dynamics. For the first time, the colony was no longer populated by forcing people to come or inducing them with lies. Instead, from this moment onwards arrivals were voluntary, either direct invitees or illegal immigration (to which the government generally turns its back).
Due to this fundamental change, French Guiana finally managed to raise its population back to 100,000 in 1990 for the first time since colonialists first arrived in 1500. Many more people would arrive. During the 1970s and 1980s, following the French withdrawal from Vietnam, hundreds Hmong refugees from Laos resettled in French Guiana. In the late 1980s, more than 10,000 Surinamese refugees, mostly Maroons, arrived after fleeing the Surinamese Civil War. In the last couple of decades, there have been further waves of immigration from Venezuela and Brazil. Due in large part to all these new arrivals, the population has tripled since 1990 and GDP has doubled from EUR 1,9bn in 2000 to EUR 4,7bn in 2022 (see here).
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French Guiana’s population experiments hold lessons for us all. First, they tell us that governments should never force people to move or work. Slavery, forced labour, and forced displacement simply do not work. Second, immigration is the key to both survival and growth. This has been as true for French Guiana over the past several hundred years as it is today in most Western economies, where living standards can only be maintained if immigration compensates for declining birth rates and increasing longevity.
The End
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