When writing of his experience of imprisonment in his celebrated memoirs, Jean François Paul de Gondi, cardinal de Retz, looked to the example of the Consolation de théologie of Boethius and claimed ‘that any man who is imprisoned must try to be the vinctus in Christo, described by Saint Paul’ . Having suffered a lengthy period of frequently quite rude treatment behind bars, the intrepid cardinal had eventually escaped from his prison in Brittany, making a flight to the coast and from there to Spain and ultimately Rome. Yet his prison companion, a canon of Retz’s cathedral of Notre Dame, was unable to cope and in despair slit his own throat. At their extremes, these two examples provide a first insight into the very different reactions of individuals to the realities of incarceration. This paper investigates the reality of daily life in state prisons in seventeenth-century France, and seeks to explore the psychological and physical impact upon the inmates as well as the religious, intellectual and cultural resources they drew upon in order to cope with their ordeal. Although individual attitudes to imprisonment, or exile, must, by their very nature, vary according to context and character, it is still possible to identify patterns that help to place the reactions of Retz,the unfortunate canon and other victims of such punishment into a broader political and cultural framework.
Prison/Exile: Controlled Spaces in Early Modern Europe 