[In the following essay, Brombert suggests reasons for the historical connection between authors and imprisonment. He finds the precursors for the nineteenth-century fascination with prison imagery in both eighteenth-century Gothic literature and the dramatic fall of the Bastille, which reverberated throughout Europe.]

The prisoner is a great dreamer.

—Dostoevsky

… this eternal image of the cell, always recurring in the poets' songs …

—Albert Béguin

Prison haunts our civilization. Object of fear, it is also a subject of poetic reverie. The prison wish does exist. The image of immurement is essentially ambivalent in the Western tradition. Prison walls confine the “culprit,” victimize the innocent, affirm the power of society.¹ But they also, it would seem, protect poetic meditation and religious fervor. The prisoner's cell and the monastic cell look strangely alike.

Poets in particular, as Albert Béguin remarked, are taken with the prison image. Is this because they have been frequent inmates of jails, ever since jails have existed? Béguin suggests a deeper reason: the poet sings of freedom. Between his vocation and the prisoner's fate there appears to be “a natural and substantial bond, a significant affinity.”² For the freedom in question is of the mind; it can be attained only through withdrawal into the self. It is the turbulence of life that the poet—a “spiritual anarchist”—comes to view as exile or captivity.

Romanticism, especially in France, has endowed the prison symbol with unusual prestige. This is not to deny that grim jails—real and metaphoric—served to bring out themes of terror and oppression; that images of labyrinths, undergrounds, traps, buried secrets, crushing covers, and asphyxiating encirclements provided the symbolic décor for a tragic awareness. The motif of the gloomy prison became insistent toward the end of the 18th century, in large part for political and ideological reasons. The symbolic value attributed to the Bastille and other state prisons viewed as tyrannical constructs, the nightmarish architectural perspectives in the famous “Prigioni” etchings of Piranesi, the cruel fantasies of the Marquis de Sade conceived in prison and projected into further enclosed spaces, the setting of Gothic novels in dungeons, vaults, and oubliettes—all this can tell us a great deal about the structures of the Romantic imagination, and the favored dialectical tensions between oppression and the dream of freedom, between fate and revolt, between the awareness of the finite and the longing for infinity.

The link between enclosure and inner freedom is at the heart of the Romantic sensibility. The title of Stendhal's novel, La Chartreuse de Parme, has puzzled many a reader, not merely because Parma is without a charterhouse, but because not even a fictional charterhouse appears in the novel's field of vision. It is clear, however, that the charterhouse in question is really none other than the Farnese Tower—in other words, the prison-fortress. The title thus proposes the central metaphor, as well as the parable of a fear translated into a blessing. The link between enclosure and spirituality is unmistakable. Paul Jacob, one of the strangest figures of the period, noted in his preface to Saintine's Picciola—the story of a disbeliever who regains his faith while in jail—that the prisoner in his dungeon and the monk in his cell are “eternal sources of reverie and meditation.”³

Fictional metaphors and social problems overlap. The monastic model is explicitly brought to bear on utopian penology. Prison reform, very much debated since the end of the 18th century, became a burning issue under the Restoration. The controversy, which was to reach fever pitch under the July Monarchy, centered on the question of the cellular prison régime. Was the cell a redemptive punishment? Tocqueville and Beaumont travelled to the United States to observe and compare the model penitentiaries in Philadelphia and Auburn. Which was preferable, the cenobitic or the anchoritic system? One thing was clear: the monastic model seemed the pattern for the future. In 1838, Léon Faucher (De la Réforme des prisons, p. 180) came to the conclusion that the original inspiration for prison punishment (hence the word “penitentiary”!) was monastic existence, “voluntary penitence.” In 1847, the International Penitentiary Congress pronounced itself in favor of solitary confinement.⁴ Isolation in the cell was to be redemptive, regenerative. Salvation and rehabilitation were increasingly viewed as dependent on the privacy of the cell. Punitur ne pecatur: a prison historian somewhat ironically recalls this formula, after reminding his readers that it was the French Revolution, destroyer of the Bastille, which elevated prison to the dignity of rational punishment.⁵

The monastic prison image is reflected in the popular imagination. Prison inmates themselves seem aware of the metaphor. A recent survey by the politically activist GIP (Groupe d'Information sur les Prisons) quotes a prisoner in the “model” prison of Fleury Mérogis: “No complaints about the cells. They're not very big, but they're clean. They're a little like a monk's cell” (ça fait un peu cellule de moine).⁶ The underlying shuttle or reversibility of images is profoundly revealed in a book that has left its imprint on generations of readers. Dantès, the hero-prisoner of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo, is fated to be reborn and liberated in the cell occupied by the monastic figure of Father Faria. The prisoner-monk and the monk-prisoner: the two images converge in Alexandre Dumas' novel.

The place of enclosure and suffering is also conceived of as the protected and protective space, the locus of reverie and freedom. Our tradition is rich in tales that transmute sequestration into a symbol of security. Securum carcer facit. The motto is developed in lines that go back to the 17th century:

Celui qui le premier m'osta la liberté
                    Me mit en sureté:
De sa grace je suis hors de prise et de crainte.
(He who first took away my freedom
                    Put me in safety:
Thanks to him, I am beyond reach and fear.)(7)

But, even earlier, folklore, legends, fairy tales, the tradition of romance, provide variations on the theme of protective custody. The motif occurs repeatedly in Renaissance epics. The magician Atlantes builds an enchanted castle to lock up his favorite hero Rogero, the better to shield him from danger. Merlin renders similar service in the Arthurian legend. Psychoanalysis has since confirmed the yearning for the enclosed space, the latent fear of the threatening outside. Agoraphobia is a recognizable symptom. Constriction is not necessarily a feared condition. Bertram D. Lewin, in The Psychoanalysis of Elation, suggests that the idea of the closed space corresponds not to an anxiety phantasm but to a phantasm of safety.

But with the safety dream goes the dream of freedom through transcendence. The spirit wills itself stronger than prison bars.

Stone Walls do not a Prison make,
          Nor Iron bars a Cage …

writes the poet Richard Lovelace, who sings of the victory of the prisoner's mind over suffering:

Tryumph in your Bonds and Paines,
And daunce to th' Musick of your Chaines.

It is in the same spirit that Byron conjures up the figure of the poet-prisoner Tasso to extol the tragic liberation through confinement. The “wings” of the mind make it possible to soar beyond oppressive walls:

For I have battled with mine agony,
And made me wings wherewith to overfly
The narrow surface of my dungeon wall.

Heine's famous epigram is apposite: “The love of freedom is a prison flower” (Die Freiheitsliebe ist eine Kerkerblume). In this perspective, the characteristic Romantic figure of the convict—the forçat—acquires a special meaning. Larger even than the figure of revolt (Balzac's convict Vautrin) looms the figure of salvation (Hugo's convict Jean Valjean). For, in its mythic dimension, the carceral imagery implies the presence of a threshold, the possibility of a passage, an initiation—a passage from the inside to the beyond, from isolation to communion, from punishment and suffering to redemption, from sadness to that profound and mysterious joy which poets such as Hugo associate with the eternal secret of human bondage.

The prison fear and the prison dream have been powerful literary themes. But never, it would seem, have they so persistently pressed themselves on the writer's imagination as during the 19th century. History and politics are no doubt largely responsible. The arbitrary arrests (lettres de cachet) and the state prisons of the Ancien Régime, the symbolism of the Bastille and of its epic fall, the revolutionary jails, the political detentions throughout Metternich's Europe, the shadow of the Spielberg, where Silvio Pellico and other victims languished, the police repressions of popular uprisings—all conspired to dramatize and poetize the prison image. This pervasive prison concern explains in part why the 19th-century sensibility was incapable of separating moral indignation from poetic vision. The ambivalence was to be vividly illustrated, toward the end of the century, in the fictional biography of the revolutionary socialist Louis Auguste Blanqui. Gustave Geffroy's L'Enfermé (The Captive) is a documentary novel on the strange destiny of this political activist whose prison vocation made him live out his own fiction. For Blanqui, the enfermé, viewed himself as determined by literary models: the Mont-Saint-Michel fortress, where he and other inmates became fascinated with the prison fate of Silvio Pellico, is repeatedly referred to as the “French Spielberg”; his “cup of bitterness” makes of him, in his own eyes, a “Job” and a victim of “Dante's hell”; the spiritual “freedom” discovered in jail becomes so precious to him that, having returned to “free life,” he reconstructs his own cell. “Prison followed the man, reconstituted itself around him by his own volition, no matter where he was.”⁸

The Romantic imagination exploits the dramatic potential of sequestration and exile. But the importance of the carceral themes is clearly prefigured in the literature of the 18th century. The nightmarish locales of the Gothic novel indicate a yearning for the irrationality of depths and labyrinthine constriction. Their oneiric structures are graphically confirmed in Piranesi's imaginary prisons, his carceri d'invenzione.⁹ These dizzying descents to the underground, these crushing stone constructs, appear again in many a Romantic text. But it is not fortuitous if the taste for Piranesi and for Sade's rape scenes (always in situations of confinement) corresponds historically to the growing dream of political freedom and individual dignity.¹⁰ The 18th century is known to be the age of “reason”; but it is also—especially as the century comes to a close—an age that delighted in horror, and was fascinated by all the manifestations of coercion. The obsession with walls, crypts, forced religious vocations, inquisitional procedures, parallels the beginnings of a revolt against arbitrariness.

Imaginary plight and real plight reflect each other. Events were to confirm the latent sense of anguish. Many families, at this turning point of history, underwent the harrowing experience of imprisonment. It was in prison that André Chénier composed some of his most powerful poems. The new century added further distress. For the young Hugo, as for the young Vigny, the word “prison” was to retain a grim resonance. The fall of Napoleon plunged Europe into a renewed fear of political detentions. If the image of the Bastille, after 1815, continued to function as a symbol, this is because it had come to mean more than itself. This Bastille metaphor was clearly understood as a meaningful anachronism: the prisons of post-Napoleonic, reactionary Europe were being denounced obliquely. Michelet, for whom the Bastille myth was a lasting inspiration, diagnosed the anachronism. He knew full well that, from the Spielberg to Siberia, Europe was covered with prisons more terrible than the destroyed Bastille. Casanova, who had been detained in the infamous Piombi of Venice, knew it too: “I have seen at the Spielberg, in Moravia, prisons far more gruesome. …”¹¹ It is against this political background that one must assess the prestige of Casanova, Cellini, Sade, Baron von der Trenck, Latude, Linguet, Pellico, Andryane, as well as many other prison heroes past and present.

Certain favorite themes might also explain the intense interest of Romantic writers in the prison image: tragic beauty of solitude, glorification of the individual and concern for the problem of identity, existential anguish (Freud was later to insist on the relation between Angst and angustiae), spatio-temporal motifs (arrested prison time viewed as an utopian atemporality), exaltation of the rebellious outlaw who indicts society as a prison and himself becomes the hero of a double drama of fall and redemption, pride in any punishment under the dual aegis of Prometheus-Lucifer.

The topoi, or commonplaces, of prison literature can also be listed: the sordid cell and the hospitable cell, the cruelty of jailors (but also the presence of the “good” jailor), glimpses of the landscape and of the sky, the contrast between the ugliness of the “inside” and the supposed splendor of the surrounding scenery, prisons within the prison (the image of the iron mask), the insanity of the captive, the inscriptions in the stone, the symbolism of the wall as an invitation to transcendence. If even the most atrocious jail can be transformed into a mediating space where consciousness learns to love despair and takes full possession of itself, it is no doubt because—as Gaston Bachelard put it—man is a “great dreamer of locks.”¹² Even man's consolatory prison activities, as repeatedly presented in Romantic literature, betray the urge to exploit creatively the possibilities of concentration and expansion. On the one hand, mental prowess and experimentation (geometric progressions formulated without help of paper, imaginary chess games); on the other hand, an outward reach, love at a distance (often for the jailor's daughter), conversations with the beloved (in fairy tales the beloved may be changed into a bird!), a movement of the mind toward the outside which makes the prisoner reinvent communication. For the “other” remains a presence. Hence the obsession with writing, secret alphabets, tappings on the walls, underground communications.

Two opposing and simultaneous movements can here be followed: the one toward an inner center (a search for identity, knowledge, the operations of memory); the other toward a transcending outside which corresponds to the joys of the imagination and the ecstasy of spiritual escape. Intimacy with the elusive self is the aim of the first movement, the quest within. Essentially unheroic, the movement toward the internal cell of meditation corresponds to a nocturnal lyricism, to a quest for authenticity which, at its extreme point, tolerates no histrionics, leaves no room for any pose. Novalis speaks of the mysterious road that leads to this interior region. The most diverse texts, in our literary tradition, confirm this association of the prisoner's descent into the self with the quest for a personal truth, the quest for an original identity. Robinson Crusoe is an exemplary figure: on his prison-island, he is quick to create further limits within limits; he builds a fortification, he erects walls, not merely to ward off danger, but to surround himself, to confine himself—and thus to define himself. Rousseau, on another island, dreams of living for the rest of his life as a happy prisoner. In one of the basic texts for an understanding of Romanticism—the fifth “Promenade” in the Rêveries (where the Bastille image occurs in association with the very notion of reverie)—Rousseau describes his happy stay on the island of Saint Pierre, and expresses the desire to see the island refuge become for him a “prison perpetuelle.” The key words (circonscrite, enfermé, asile, confiné) all suggest an interiorization of the prison image which corresponds to the sense of almost God-like self-sufficiency (this state in which “on se suffit à soi-même comme Dieu”), and points to the central metaphor of Rousseauistic solipsism: “… ce séjour isolé où je m'étais enlacé de moi-même …” (this isolated abode where I did entwine with myself …).

But as Albert Béguin observed—precisely in talking about Novalis—the inward movement implies a glance toward what lies beyond, an ascent, an expansion.¹³ Neither the island nor the narrowest of cells represents an obstacle, in metaphoric terms, to the dynamics of escape. A wall asks to be scaled. The eye seeks the chink, measures the distance. The mind is carried through space. Nothing appears more constant than the notion of freedom associated with the cell—freedom, as it were, from the imperatives of time and space. Poets repeatedly sing of this utopia and of this atemporality.

There were no stars, no earth, no time

writes Byron in the admirable ninth stanza of The Prisoner of Chillon, entirely based on a series of negative constructions. To which Tristan Corbière, in a poem ironically entitled Libertà—A la Cellule IV bis (prison royale de Gênes), seems to provide an echo:

Plus de jours, plus de nuits. …

What is involved is an affirmation of tragic elation and dauntlessness. In Schiller's Die Raüber, not exactly the setting of a happy imprisonment, it is in the darkest dungeon that the dream of freedom penetrates “like lightning in the night” (… wie ein Blitz in der Nacht).

It is of course perfectly logical that the dynamics of escape (and escapism) should affirm themselves most powerfully within the context of captivity. Balzac evokes the art of convicts who know how to conceive and execute masterful schemes. Escape becomes a challenge to human ingeniousness. Nineteenth-century readers were likely to appreciate Benvenuto Cellini's defiant advice to his jailors (“guardatemi bene”—“lock me up well”), for he promised that he would do all he could to escape. (Pope Paul III, ex-virtuoso of prison escape, had spoken of Cellini's feat admiringly as a “maravigliosa cosa.”) The 19th century rediscovers Cellini. And Romantic literature is crowded with its own virtuoso jail-breakers: in the works of Stendhal, Alexandre Dumas, and above all Victor Hugo, who describes with relish the “muscle science” of convicts and the “incredible art” of rising perpendicularly. Hugo, as we shall see, does not merely praise the unusual skill in fabricating escape instruments of precision (“There are Benvenuto Cellinis in the penitentiary”); he sees in any man fired by the frightful thirst for liberty an “inspired” dreamer struggling toward the “sublime.”¹⁴

The darkest dream of freedom, in the Gothic novel particularly, carries an otherworldly intentionality. Clare, in The Monk, evokes with rapture the “glorious sunbeams.” But this spiritualized yearning for escape also appears in works far removed from the Gothic, or even Romantic, tradition. Jack London, in a prison novel entitled Star Rover, partly a documented denunciation of torture and human degradation in California penitentiaries, invents a prisoner-hero who, through a process of mental concentration and self-hypnosis, attains a temporal and spiritual freedom that allows him, at will, to “leave” not only his cell, but his era and the limits of this world. The levitation-ascent leads to a walk “among the stars.” The confrontation with anguish and nothingness in a prison setting, the tête-à-tête with ultimate fear, are of course recurrent motifs fully exploited in the Existentialist tradition. Leonid Andreyev, in The Seven Who Were Hanged, pungently conveys the sense of absurdity as the prisoner, awaiting execution, views the most ordinary objects and gestures with a feeling of terror and incongruity. Yet even Andreyev's protagonist, from within the cellular limits symbolizing the limits of his existence, experiences the “divine spectacle” of walls that vanish, of time and space that are destroyed, leaving him with the impression that he is in the presence of a “supreme being.”

The link between visible loss and secret victory underlies the prison theme. It is not unrelated to the Christian notion of lost paradise and felix culpa. Robinson Crusoe, very much in favor with the Romantics, is once again exemplary, as he declares never to have been happier than in his “forsaken solitary condition,” and gives thanks to God for having there opened his eyes and provided cause “to praise Him for dungeons and prisons.”¹⁵ Simone Weil, in our time, has given the Christian paradox its deeper resonance, stressing the dialectics of absence and presence (“One must therefore love that which does not exist”) and suggesting that the relation of man to God is dependent on a barrier. The knocking against the wall becomes a metaphysical symbol. “Every separation is a bond.”¹⁶ This religious thematization of the prison image confirms its metaphysical power. The Imitation of Christ teaches indeed that he who will cherish his cell will find peace. Western literature provides countless illustrations of the salvational virtue of the prison cell. Mary Stuart, in Schiller's play, comes to consider her prison as fitting for the visit of the celestial messenger who will show her the way to eternal freedom. Dimitri, in The Brothers Karamazov, declares that one cannot exist in prison without God. He discovers that a “new man” has risen up in him as he confronts the peeling walls that enclose him.

A wide range of mediating and stereotyped images links the dream-prisoner to what lies beyond the symbolic walls: windows, hills, clouds, birds—even water. The image of the bird seems favored, perhaps because it lends itself to a fundamental ambiguity. For the bird, in its free flight, brings to mind the cage from which it might have escaped, the cage that awaits it, the cage that it perhaps regrets. If indeed the quest for spiritual freedom and the redemptive thrust carry toward an elsewhere, a reverse impulse tends toward the still center, toward another form of release, a deliverance from the causal world of phenomena. It is at this still center, this still point of the turning world, that the hidden secret, the ineffable treasure, the perception of the numen, are to be found. Enclosure becomes the warrant of perfect fulfillment. It allows the constricted spirit to leave behind what Villiers de L'Isle-Adam calls the “geôle du monde,” the worldly jail, and to escape from the world of Becoming.¹⁷

The dream of the happy prison defies the worldly jail. How else is one to interpret King Lear's elation, toward the end of the play, at the thought of imprisonment together with Cordelia? “Come, let's away to prison”—he seems almost impatient to be locked up. How is one to explain this impatience and hint of joy? Is it battle fatigue (he has indeed incurred the worst!); is it mental derangement; is it despair? All is lost, to be sure—but Cordelia has been found. In twelve intensely suggestive lines, Shakespeare indicates the reason for this unexpected delight. For father and daughter, so Lear hopes, prison will be an enchanted cage. Indeed like “birds i'the cage” they will be able to sing their poem of love, forgiveness and innocence:

                    So we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies.

In this cage they will feel freed from life's snares and servitudes; they will—so the old king dreams—be endowed with superior vision and glimpse the mystery of things “as if [they] were God's spies.”

The idea that prison can be the locus of spiritual freedom and revelation is not merely a dream of mad, sinned-against kings. A similar notion determines Benvenuto Cellini, in his Vita, to write a chapter in praise of incarceration (In Lode di detta prigione) and to insist—he the fiery adventurer-artist—on the spiritual initiation he underwent in jail.

Chi vuol saper quant'è il valor de dio,
e quant' un uomo a quel ben si assomiglia,
convien che stie'n prigione, al parer mio.

Similar effusions inspire the famous Le Mie Prigioni by Silvio Pellico, the Milanese liberal who experienced years of “hard prison” (carcere duro) in Metternich's political prison, the Spielberg. There were those who loudly deplored his Christian lyricism, discovered in jail, as a weakness. But the unusual success of Pellico's book (in France alone there were five translations during the first year after publication in 1833) suggests that its tone and message had immense appeal. Pellico insists on the rediscovered light; he copies with deep emotion the edifying graffiti on his prison walls (Benedico la prigone); he glorifies suffering. A century and a half later, his name is still revered by another famous political prisoner, Solzhenitsyn. The author of The Gulag Archipelago indeed sums up the prison theme: “It has been known for many centuries that prison causes the profound rebirth of a human being. The examples are innumerable—such as that of Silvio Pellico.” And Solzhenitsyn adds, as his own testament to the future: “… I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me: ‘Bless you, prison!’”¹⁸

The rebirth in question implies the redemptive powers of imagination. Repressed freedom and poetic inventiveness are intimately related. This would explain the specific prestige of the sequestered artist. Tasso in jail continues to be a subject of inspiration for other poets. The enclosed space is also the locus of artistic creativity.

We return to the figure of the writer. If indeed poets experience an affinity for the world of walls, bars, and locks, it is because it reflects the image of their own condition. Leopardi, in the imaginary dialogue between Tasso and his own genio familiare exalts sequestration because it rejuvenates the soul (ringiovanisce l'animo) and galvanizes the imagination—the virtu di favellare.¹⁹ Gérard de Nerval imagines the jailor as eternally jealous of the prisoner's dreams. Tristan Corbière is more explicit still; in his poem on liberty-in-jail, he proclaims the lyric joy of the prisoner-poet singing about the inspiration of (and to) his happy cage:

—Moi: jamais je n'ai chanté
Que pour toi, dans ta cage,
Cage de la gaité.(20)

The joyous confinement is here clearly associated with the creative act. It is also viewed as a sanctuary.

Prison, sûre conquête
Où le poète est roi!

Metaphor implies reversibility and the negation of literal meaning. The abhorred prison becomes a holy place. “A prison is a sacred asylum,” affirms one of the characters in Pétrus Borel's Madame Putiphar. And Byron, whose Prisoner of Chillon explains in the final stanza that “These heavy walls to [him] have grown / A hermitage,” writes even more directly in the Sonnet on Chillon (referring to “the eternal spirit of the chainless mind”):

Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
                              And thy sad floor an altar. …

But the figurative sense is also convertible. Poetry becomes prison, just as the mind (more specifically the skull) becomes the substitute for the abstract notion of closed space. Hugo provides rich examples of this interiorization of enclosure. The noir cerveau of Piranesi in the poem Les Mages prepares for the metaphor of the brain-jail (crâne-cachot) where the spider suspends its web. What the brain of the poet holds locked up preciously is nothing less than the infinite dimension of poetry and the secret of the world. “Un poète est un monde enfermé dans un homme” (A poet is a world locked up in a human being).

This internalized prison space is not merely the trope for the writer; it is the metaphor of the textual space. What is involved is the question of spatial form, and specifically the challenge of formal contraction as well as the fecund struggle with the limits of language. It is surely not a coincidence that Wordsworth, in his defense of the sonnet form, strings together a series of monastic and cellular images:

Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room;
And hermits are contented with their cells …

and that Baudelaire, also celebrating the sonnet, develops the notion that constricting forms give a deeper sense of infinity.

But beyond strictly formal problems, beyond the circumscription of space (as Edgar Allan Poe put it), there is the emblem of the writer's vocation. Enclosure conjures up the image of the writer-at-work: Balzac's mansarde féconde, the “fertile garret”; Vigny and the ivory tower; Stendhal and the prison de soie, the “silken prison”; Flaubert and his study with its shutters closed, the Croisset cell where he gets drunk “on ink” (“… I live like a monk”); Huysmans and the decadent retreat, the thébaïde raffinée; Kafka and the life-prison converted into a pleasure castle, a Lustschloss; Sartre for whom writing is sequestration (“I envied the famous prisoners …”). The list is far from complete.

The textual space and the prison space of salvation ultimately merge. Proust, for whom the shuttle operation between reading and writing required the intimacy of the secluded room (the darkened room offering the spectacle total de l'été), proposes an image that might well serve as epigraph for this study. This image strikingly telescopes a metaphor of enclosure and a metaphor of survival: the invalid's room transformed into a diluvial ark. “I understood then that Noah never saw the world so clearly as from inside the ark, though it was closed and there was darkness on the earth.”²¹

Salvation through enclosure, insight into darkness—the paradox is rooted in the age-old symbol of the captive soul, in the religious notion of a happy captivity. The importance of this paradox for the Romantic imagination will perhaps be better grasped if it is first set in the context of a tradition that Pascal extends and illustrates with his famous image of the prisoner's cell—the cachot.

Notes

1. In Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (Gallimard, 1975), Michel Foucault has analyzed the strategy of punishment and the “politics of coercion” in modern society. See also “Les Intellectuels et le pouvoir,” entretien Michel Foucault-Gilles Deleuze, L'Arc, 49, 1972, p. 6. Chekhov, in one of his most interesting short stories, had already suggested that society affirms itself through enclosure. (“Ward No. 6,” in The Portable Russian Reader, ed. Bernard Guilbert Guerney, N.Y., The Viking Press, 1947, pp. 244-320.)

2. “Les Poètes et la prison,” in Création et Destinée, A la Baconnière, Neuchâtel, 1973, pp. 145-146. This article first appeared in Labyrinthe, Geneva, 15 October 1945.

3. “Quelques recherches sur l'emploi du temps dans les Prisons d'Etat,” préface to Picciola, Boston, Otis, Broaders and Company, 1845, pp. 3-38.

4. See the account of the penological polemics in P. Savey-Casard, Le Crime et la Peine dans l'oeuvre de Victor Hugo, Presses Universitaires de France, 1956.

5. See Jacques Leauté, Les Prisons, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968, pp. 9-12. Michel Foucault rightly insists on the techniques of “Christian monasticism” and the “myths of resurrection.” (Surveiller et punir, Gallimard, 1975, pp. 125, 242.)

6. Le G.I.P. enquête dans une Prison modèle: Fleury Mérogis, 1971, p. 11.

7. Pierre Le Moyne, Devises héroïques et morales, Paris, A. Courbé, 1649.

8. Gustave Geffroy, L'Enfermé (1897), Fasquelle, 1919, pp. 111, 124, 145, 268.

9. Maurice Lévy, Le Roman “Gothique” anglais 1764-1824, Toulouse, Imprimerie M. Espic, 1968, pp. 622-634. Concerning the “anguish of imprisoned space” in Piranesi's work, Marguerite Yourcenar believes that the image of dream structures precedes the “image of real structures.” (“Les prisons imaginaires de Piranèse,” in Nouvelle Revue Française, 97, January 1961, pp. 63-78.)

10. See the remarkable pages by Jean Starobinski in L'Invention de la liberté, Skira, 1964, pp. 197-203.

11. Casanova, Mémoires, Livre de Poche, 1969, iv, p. 314.

12. Gaston Bachelard, La Poétique de l'espace, Presses Universitaires de France, 1957, p. 79.

13. See Albert Béguin's development about Novalis in L'Ame romantique et le rêve, J. Corti, 1939, pp. 204-213.

14. Victor Hugo, Œuvres complètes, Le Club Français du Livre, xi, pp. 114, 587, 691.

15. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, Signet-New American Library, 1961, pp. 146-147.

16. Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la grâce, Plon, 1948, pp. 112-113, 146.

17. Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Axël, Les Maitres du Livre, 1912, p. 224.

18. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Harper & Row, vol. 2, 1974, pp. 604-616.

19. “Dialogo di Torquato Tasso e del suo genio familiare,” in Poesie e prose, Mondadori, 1949, pp. 874-881.

20. Libertà—A la Cellule IV bis (prison royale de Gênes).

21. Les Plaisirs et les jours, Gallimard, 1924, p. 13.