In 1931, a man named Henri Charrière was given a life sentence for killing a pimp named Roland Le Petit. He claimed that he was innocent, and that the police framed him for a crime he never committed. He was determined to escape prison at any cost. Everyone called Henri Charrière “Papillon”, because of the butterfly tattoo on his chest. Together with thousands of other prisoners, he was transported to the tropical islands of the French Guiana. The French prison guards claimed that escaping the island was impossible.
After years of going in and out of solitary confinement and escaping jail multiple times, he finally left a place known as Devil’s Island, which slowly broke down men and drove them insane. When he was free, he published a book called Papillon all about this experiences as a prisoner, and it exposed the cruelty of the prison system in French Guiana. Two movies have been made based on his autobiography- one in 1978, and a second in 2018.
A Gangster, But Not a Killer
Henri Charrière became an orphan when he was 10 years old, and he was raised by his older sisters. There were very few options for him to have a good life growing up alone in Paris. When he was 17, he enlisted and served two years in the French navy. Like most navy men, he got a lot of tattoos when he was out at sea. He had a butterfly tattooed on his chest, because it symbolized freedom. When he came home, he got married, and he and his wife had a daughter together. Despite trying to live a good life, he found that he was still pulled into the Paris underworld.
In his memoirs, Papillon admitted that he was guilty of being a thief. He was very good at picking locks and breaking into safes. He went by the alias of “Papillon” or “The Butterfly”. He had connections in the underworld, and people knew of him, because he was always polite and dressed like a gentleman, when he was really a thief.
According to a reporter in Paris who did some digging, Henri Charrière was having an affair with a prostitute, and working undercover as a pimp while working as a police informant. He was living a double life of being a very rich man in the underworld, but still got to go home to see his wife and kids. However, this was never included in his autobiography. So there is no telling if this reporter is telling the truth or not.
Apparently, the police did not like him very much, and they were angry that they could not catch the allusive Papillon in a crime. They were jealous that he was handsome, and could afford to wear tailored suits and have the finer things in life. One day, in 1931, he was accused of killing a pimp named Roland Le Petit. When he asked for their proof, they claimed they had “confidential information” that proved he was guilty.
Later, the police got a testimony from a man who put the blame for Roland Le Petit’s death on Papillon, but there was no physical evidence whatsoever. On his day in court, he showed up in a full suit, bowtie, and hair slicked back. His lawyer was exasperated, saying that he should have dressed more modestly in order to win the sympathy of the jury. Even though the only evidence against him was hearsay, the jury gave Papillon a life sentence plus 10 years of hard labor.
Apparently, a life sentence was extremely harsh for killing a pimp in the 1930’s, because deaths of people who worked in the underworld were never treated the same as killing a regular person. In just about every way, Papillon’s incarceration was unfair and unjust. He had to send a telegram to his wife and sister letting them know that he was going to jail. They wrote back, but there was nothing they could do. At first, he spent some time in a prison in Caen, France, before being transferred to a prison on a tropical island in the French Guiana called St. Laurent du Maroni.
Prisoners were forced to do their hard labor out in the hot son, and many of them collapsed from heat exhaustion. Many men died also of tropical disease or malnutrition. The prison had a rule that even attempting to escape was punishable by 2 years in solitary confinement, where they were locked in a dark cell without any human interaction while only eating soup and bread and sleeping on a wooden plank. The second attempt was 5 years of solitary confinement in the same cell. After that, they would be sent to a place called Devil’s Island to find their own food and live out the rest of their lives in isolation. If a prisoner caused too much trouble in general, he would be sent to the guillotine for a public execution in front of the other guards.
While in prison, Papillon met a man named Louis Dega who was in prison serving a 15-year sentence for the white collar crime of fraud and counterfeiting. His first time counterfeiting, he created five fake savings bonds of 10,000 Francs each, and cashed it in for 50,000 francs. With inflation, this would have been worth roughly $700,000 by today’s standards. Soon enough, he ran a full-fledged printing operation, and hired a team of accomplices. Dega insulted the wife of one of his employees who had gotten arrested. This employee decided to turn Dega into the police as part of a plea deal.
Louis Dega managed to smuggle thousands of francs into prison with him. He planned to use this money to bribe the guards and live a more comfortable life. But it only made him a target in the eyes of the other prisoners. They wanted to kill him and take his money for themselves. Henri Charriere offered to protect Dega in exchange for the money he needed to escape.
Dega and Papillon became best friends. Even though Dega did not have a life sentence, and he could have just behaved himself and waited to return to France after 15 years, he decided that he wanted to escape the prison, too, and start a new life in South America.