Aqui começa o Brasil ” : penal colonization , territorialization and border construction of the Oyapock river

The Oyapock River has been the border between France and Brazil since the Treaty of Bern came to resolve a centuries-old dispute between the two states. Only populated by indigenous communities and a few adventurers, the two banks of the river are untouched by any lasting colonial and national settlement before the second half of the 19th century. Penal colonization is the formula adopted by the two states to fill the "void" of a border to be formalized. The criminal models circulate and are reinterpreted by participating with great intensity in the making of the territory.

Brazil has settled all its border incidents with its neighbours through amicable agreements and appeals to international arbitration tribunals. Its pride and heroes were not generals, but statesmen like Rio Branco, who had managed to avoid war through their common sense and conciliatory spirit. Brazil, turned in on itself, its territorial border, has no desire for conquest, no imperialist tendencies. (ZWEIG, 1941, p.26) Naive lover of Brazil, which he travelled for a long time during a six-month pilgrimage, Stefan Zweig is nonetheless a precise and documented observer. Coming from Europe, plagued at these times by nationalist tensions, he is a cheerful spectator of a country-continent whose only foreign policy doctrine is peace and sovereignty. The Austrian man is not mistaken when he portrays the Baron of Rio Branco, the mastermind of the "conquest of the North", the most famous resident of the palace of Itamaraty. The Amazonian margins, after the fixing of the platinian 1 borders, concentrate the Brazilian diplomatic efforts within the framework of an extension of its internal borders. The Treaty of Berne (1900) settled the dispute between France and Brazil over the territory between Lake Amapá and the Oyapock River. It also fixed the French Brazilian border on the latter, settling for good a conflict inaugurated by the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). The statue of Marco Zero can proudly claim, in front of the Oyapock: aqui começa o Brasil.
However, the legal construction of the border is only a necessary prerequisite to set a territorial limit. A state must deploy its sovereignty so that the border-line becomes the embodied marker of a living territory. Its assertion is a preliminary condition for the security and the integrity of the Nation, in its organic dimension. The Portuguese have thus introduced the military element into the Amazonian confines, and have done so for a long time: Fort São José de Macapá is the most successful example of a large-scale defensive strategy, inscribed both strategically and symbolically through the construction of this authentic stone manifesto. In the most remote areas, military posts and presidios 2 provide a wide border network, which nevertheless remains a challenge in a forest area largely untouched by permanent sedentary settlements. The question of Brazil's northern borders then became one of the major geopolitical issues of the young Brazilian Republic. In 1890, the Chamber of Deputies was concerned by "the urgent need to populate our borders, especially the Amazon, which was still largely disputed by European governments, and is, until today, totally defenceless". 3 It is not only a question of setting boundaries, but of transforming space into territory. As a portion of the earth's surface in its geographical definition, the notion of space refers in international law to the concept of terra nullius, which has been familiar to Iberian populations since the papal 1 Brazil's southern borders with Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina. Brazilian border -and the moral impact -the prison is now perceived as a "death camp", a "dry guillotine". On the Brazilian side of the river, the federal government founded an "agricultural TRACOL, Samuel; HOUTE, Arnaud-Dominique. "Aqui começa o Brasil": penal colonization, territorialization and border construction of the Oyapock river. 1853-1927 Diálogos, Maringá-PR, Brasil, v. 24, n. 2, p. 25-51, mai./ago. 2020 28 nucleus" in 1922 at the instigation of Pará Senator Justo Chermont, a member of an influential family of large landowners very well established in the future State of Amapá. 7 The current village of Clevelândia do Norte, a few kilometres south of Martinica, was chosen to welcome free families.
The first project was indeed to promote the settlement of settlers in this virgin-considered portion of the national territory. The political goal was then to carry the sovereignty of the Nation up to its northern borders, in the continuation of the policy initiated by Rio Branco. Due to a lack of volunteers, and following the 1924 8 tenentist officers' revolution, the nucleus of free settlers was reinforced with a penal colony. Until 1927, several hundred prisoners were sent to these confines, away from any rule of law. A group of opponents of the Bernardes regime were deported -not only tenentists, but also anarchists and trade unionists. From 1853 to 1927, the French -Brazilian border was invested with a penitentiary function that connected each side to the imperial project of their respective nations. By becoming prisons and cemeteries, the two territories under study were attached to vast political blocs of which they had been abstract and putative margins until then.

Colonial modernity, penal modernity: introductory reflections
These two national trajectories with strong common features indeed refer to the same political project, backed by the triumph of political and socio-economic modernity as defined by the from the social body as a prophylactic measure. This pseudo-science gives substance to a bundle of ancient representations, dialectically separating the good subject from the "born criminal", as many cia ca eg ie ga he ed nde he e " nde w d" "ba -f nd " in a We e n cie ies (KALIFA, 2013). It is indeed long-term historical representations and dynamics that allow to qualify 19 th century penal policies, much more than an immanence constituting a predefined and labelled political project.
This moving aspiration to modernity underlies the creation of the modern prison, the pivot of a penal order renewed by two requirements: keeping away the incorrigible, rehabilitating the new "dangerous classes" born from the torments of an industrial revolution that crushed men. Misery, laziness and urban corruption form the "breeding ground" 11 in which small offences and major The penal and prison versions of modernity are thus the bearers of a dynamic of consensusbuilding and serialization of social practices. As Anthony Giddens 14 points out, this construction of the social body by nation-states and their promoters must be situated in their spatiality: "modernity is the homogenization of space and time that transforms the rich diversity of people's selfperceptions in their personal contexts into impersonal interchangeability. " Sovereignty should not only be asserted but also staged in the creation of a properly national space: although marginal, the studied border spaces are the peripheral organs of a nation and its unifying project. TRACOL, Samuel; HOUTE, Arnaud-Dominique. "Aqui começa o Brasil": penal colonization, territorialization and border construction of the Oyapock river. 1853-1927 modernity are in apparent contradiction. The rule of law, the founder of social order, coexists, in the same chronology but in a fragmented geography, with the state of exception. In order to carry out their dual global project of positivist progress and population control, the two regimes studied here relegate not only men but entire territories outside the constitutional corpus. Making the history of penal colonisation necessarily holds two dimensions: penal, through the disciplinisation of men, and colonial, through the disciplinisation of territories. Brazilian "green hell" 15 , "the last country where one can live" 16 for the French, Guyanas are privileged areas of legal, social and spatial segregation.
One might be tempted to consider this penal history in its ephemeral dimension: simple parentheses, appendices of the central power and confined within a very brief chronological framework. It is, moreover, the hallmark of modernity to see another modernity succeed it.
Baudelaire, poet of modernity if ever there was one, developed a science of the moment: "modernity is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent" 17 . Without seeing any contradiction, we will try to demonstrate the founding character of prison colonization in the construction of a territory. They constitute the prerequisites for the affirmation of a collective identity and the integration of border areas into modernity through their border setting. This penitentiary moment then permanently inscribes these territories in the national project. Fugacity of the institution but permanence of its legacies: the penitentiary colonisations constitute the soft layers of a historical sedimentation over time. Transposed to the history of the penitentiary colonies, on the Oyapock as in other territories, in a global history approach that we make our own, Baudelaire's theory refers to a prison past and present that is still stretching over time. The comparative, connected and global approach commits us to identify prison colonisation as a fundamental milestone in the construction of modern states: the exploitation of man by man through forced or salaried labour and the formation of colonial and post-colonial societies.
As the seminal work of Clare Anderson (2019, p. 18) points out, "the convicts were agents of imperial occupation and expansion, pioneers of labour. They were used by all the global powers to establish and push back national and imperial boundaries and limits. To an unprecedented degree, the convicts allowed the occupation of lands distant from the national and imperial centres, both across land and sea. Their presence has left important legacies in the contemporary world". 15 To quote the title of Alberto Rangel's book. 16 LAMARCHE. a Guyane rançaise. e in de 'Agence G n a e de C nie 9 17 BAUDELAIRE, Charles. Le peintre de la vie moderne. In OEuvres complètes de Charles Baudelaire. t. III, Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885.
TRACOL, Samuel; HOUTE, Arnaud-Dominique. "Aqui começa o Brasil": penal colonization, territorialization and border construction of the Oyapock river. 1853-1927 "These men who are being wiped off the humanity" 18 : penal and criminal policies of the industrial age.
The shared historical dynamics between Brazil and France at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries call for a comparative approach that confirms the initial postulate of a strong kinship between the social, economic, political and penal models at work in both States, successively imperial and republican. Taking into account the necessary semantic precautions and taking care to circumscribe modernity in the definitions proposed above, we can use the latter notion to designate the historical context that has crossed Western countries since the 1830s, The persistence or even the development of such a range of representations may appear to be contradictory with the use of the notion of social and economic modernity, associated with political liberalism. As Frederick Cooper points out, modernity is neither a political programme, nor an ideology, nor a univocal and measurable social reality: 'in other words, the construction of an anthropology of modernity is not a good research strategy. The discovery of a discourse of modernity could be a revealing demonstration" (COOPER, 2005 p.177). Modernity is therefore more a diffuse discourse, part of the mobilization of populations and whose coherence appears in the juxtaposition of speeches, political decisions and a technè organizing the social and moral order of a political regime whose common denominator is fragility. As Arnaud Houte points out (2013): the republican regime is living in a state of siege during this transitional period between the upheavals of 1870 and the First World War. It is easy to establish a kinship with the old Brazilian TRACOL, Samuel; HOUTE, Arnaud-Dominique. "Aqui começa o Brasil": penal colonization, territorialization and border construction of the Oyapock river. 1853-1927 Republic, born out of the post-slavery divisions in 1889. Moral order is on the agenda for both regimes, as it is the best guarantee for regimes seeking legitimacy. Gambetta expressed himself in these terms at the Annecy banquet of 1872: "in a republican regime, order is the very essence of things". In Brazil, the authoritarian Republic of the early 20th century was based on the following quadriptych: work, people, race and nation. Regime crises further accentuated the coercive and conservative nature of these young republics. In order to reinforce school and political reforms in the early 1880s and to stifle the tensions that arose, the The large diasporas of the two respective states played a decisive role in these ideological transfers.
In his work on the penal colony of Anchieta Island 24 , Dirceu Franco Ferreira goes so far as to evoke "a tropicalization of fascist methods" (FRANCO FERREIRA, 2018).
The legal texts produced at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries testify to this cohabitation between liberalism -the Third Republic is based on the exercise of universal male suffrage, compulsory, secular and free schooling and freedom of the press -and social order. In   between the oligarchs of the State of Sao Paulo, a major coffee producer, and Minas Gerais, a major milk producer. 23 The motto "Ordem e progresso" is an inheritance in direct line with the philosophy of Auguste Comte. 24 Prison of the State of São Paulo.
TRACOL, Samuel; HOUTE, Arnaud-Dominique. "Aqui começa o Brasil": penal colonization, territorialization and border construction of the Oyapock river. 1853-1927 to remove from the national territory individuals whose criminal inclination is considered to be atavistic. These texts respond in their own national chronology to the context of socio-economic changes linked to the emergence of industrial societies. In Brazil, this is spatially translated by movements initiated with the 1889 Revolution: forced-march urbanization of the South-East, fed by the migratory contribution of European working-class -Italians, Portuguese, Germans -and Nordestinos, in a post-abolitionist context. Confronted with these upheavals, Brazilian society had to guard against a double pitfall, social as well as racial. This racial frame of reference is also operative in Third Republic France, which was at the height of its imperial project. The parliamentary year 1885 was marked not only by the passing of the Relegation law but also by debates on the Tonkin expedition, which marked the victory of the colonial party. Ferry, president of the Council and father of the school laws, was its main voice. The Positivist Republic relies on the criminology of Cesare Lombroso and Alexandre Lacassagne to justify a "criminal embarrassment; it also adopts the racial anthropology of Paul Broca to justify inequality between races, the foundation of the colonial order. Ferry then asserted in the House: "there is a right for the superior races because there is a duty, that of civilizing the lower classes" 25 . However, this penetration of racial science needs to be qualified in the facts: this project is not globalized nor translated into clear regulatory guidelines. The colonial state proceeds above all from pragmatic accommodations, which aim everywhere to establish its power or rather its powers. In short, at the social, racial and political levels, the legal variations of this "republican colonization" establish the negation of equality as a regime of legality. These are all constituent elements of a prison society, which we will study briefly in the following section.
Modernity then gave birth in France and Brazil to a society of disciplines. To take up the Foucauldian corpus, which has been widely verified in the selected national cases, a technique that is becoming more refined and complex is placed at the service of a total project, of which the total institutions -asylums, prisons, hospitals, prisons, and prisons -studied by Erving Goffman (1968) are the preferred tools as spaces of intense authority and concentration of disciplinary technical means. As Theodor Adorno points out, "technique is the coercive tool of alienating society". This science of punishment and control of bodies is based on theoretical models as well as empirical variations. Modernity -always as a discourse -allows its social acceptability by inserting it into a positivist ideology of progress, which could be summarized in this diptych: order in prosperity. The total disciplinarization of societies is translated into territorial hold: everywhere it is necessary to "civilize", to make the flag of the Nation fly, in other words to fill "the empty space". It is therefore in the certainty of generous and elevated sentiments that modern, liberal and democratic man can "wipe men off the face of humanity". (Camus, 1938).

Life and death of the prison communities of the Oyapock
This political and penal corpus then commanded the establishment of modern prison sites in their design, architecture and disciplinary regime. The aim was to make a history of these sites from   Working outside, with no real possibility of escape in a context of strong isolation, the convicts thus constitute a penal population "outside the walls" within a prison space that is not separated from its environment by the usual "no man's land" (COMBESSIE, 1992). In this context of extreme isolation, or even of an îléité 28 -islandness-shared by both the prisoner and the warden, the prisoner becomes another "myself" (ROUSTAING, 1998). The work can even be done without supervision, in the context of a true ex-carceration 29 : "everyone is free to chop wood wherever they want.
Besides, on reflection, where could he go with his axe alone? " (BELBENOIT, 1938  However, the administration cannot act as a demiurge: unequal in the society of free men, all the agents -in the sociological sense -continue to be unequal in a prison context. Class relations play a major role: the 3rd class warden and his family share more with the penal population than with the prison administration's executives. The prisoner/supervisor relationship then proceeds from the meeting between two proletariats and two exiles. In Ignatieff's words, the prison is a "small relay in the immense system of social reproduction" 31 , not only from the perspective of the prisoners but also of its agents. In Clevêlendia, Carlo Romani's study (2003)  Eugène Degrave wondered whether the transportation was not organised to make as many convicts as possible disappear: "we send them there to die and not to colonise. The more are eliminated, the better" 35 . The empirical testimony resonates with an implacable public speech. In 1890, the member of Parliament Jules Delafosse justifies the mass death recorded in the bagne in these terms: "many will die there, I do not ignore it; but, gentlemen, the chances of them dying are part of the In very unequal societies where misery rages, in liberal but not social Republics, punishment must respond to this iron law: any condemned person can only live better than the poorest of free citizens. Very quickly, the utopian impulses of the legislator give way to a man-crushing prison apparatus, a "dry guillotine" 37 that leaves its mark not only on the men and the prison communities but also on the territories that welcome it.

"The map is not the territory." 38
The temporal inscription of these prison communities was brief. They were nevertheless the   On these foundations, specific identities were established, the borders of which should be delimited: was it a question of nationalisation of populations and territories or, on the contrary, the ad hoc creation of a cross-border territory? There is no doubt that it is advisable to guard against any desire for labelling and essentialization, but on the contrary to trace the superimposition of identities in these polymorphous and shifting territories. To this end, the notion of hybrid frontier developed by the philosopher Amadeo Lopez is enlightening. He defines it as "a place of separation and union, the border has the characteristic of introducing between the Same and the Other this ambiguous zone -border zone -and at the same time inside and outside the relationships with the other and with oneself" 46 . By asking the question of the national, and therefore of nationality, not only in its bureaucratic but also in its identity dimension, the setting of borders imposes a new dialectic, familiar/foreign, linked to the construction of a space split between the here and the there.

Prison colonization, an Amazonian story. Concluding remarks
"Many metaphysics would ask for cartographies" (BACHELARD, 1957, p.192). In the two spaces that concentrated our study, cartography precedes territory. By founding mixed and moving identities, the imperial powers have an action on spaces as well as on individuals. Oyapock's prison projects were totalizing and drew intimate cartographies by spatializing both individual and collective metaphysics. In this sense, the penitentiary colonies were deeply situated institutions, the foundation of a sensitive experience that mixed prison and environmental experience. In this sense, the history of the penal colonies is a history of representations that is part of an Amazonian history.
As Genet pointed out in a recorded interview at the end of his life (1983), what remains of an existence is "a history and a geography". it is the umpteenth isolated attempt at a dispersed colonization, to be placed in a colonial history in the long term. It is each time the history of a settlement by marks or even by dotted lines. In this sense, the territorialization of both the Oyapock and the Amazon is deeply archipelagic. The green immensity replaces the maritime infinity: the Amazon experience is fundamentally insular. The individual was first confronted with relegation and loneliness. We then find a dialectical kinship between forest and maritime space. Ladislau's work Terra Immatura 49 (1924) synthesizes this discursive heritage with ancient roots. He describes a "place of illusion of splendour and where a civilization would remain hidden in the midst of the immensity of its forest" (p.30). In this absolute isolation live "men who are strangers to their own land". The Amazonian identity then developed paradoxes: paradise as hell, indigenous land and uprooted people, land of freedom and imprisonment, land of fortune and destitution, it was in the national imagination the "Brazilian Canaan", which structures dreams and anxieties, greatness and misery of the Nation.
Ladislau is turning this promised land into a political project. "The Amazon needs to be invaded by successive and massive human waves, of a race different from ours, because it has no capacity for initiative. "This statement concentrates the two pillars of imperial politics in the Amazon: filling the "void", dispossessing Amazonians of their Amazon. Taken up by President Vargas in his speeches, Ladislau's rhetoric leads to draw a dividing gap between the adventurous, lazy, easy-going Amazonian man to the action of the state and enterprising actors, helping the Amazonian man to take possession of his own territory. It is characteristic that more credit is given to criminals and enemies of the State from the metropolises than to the local population for developing the territories of French and Brazilian Guiana. Vargas takes up the fables of La Fontaine in an exemplary manner, pitting the Amazonian Cicada against the Metropolitan Ant. Man must therefore be fixed in a nucleus of population, a metonym of the modern, sedentary and disciplined state. In line with these socio-spatial and racial segregations, prison colonisation appears, by imposing forced labour and importing Western workers as the ideal remedy for the laziness of the Indian. Transportation then gave rise to two relegations: that of criminal deportees and that of free men in their own territory. 49 LADISLAU, Alfredo. Terra Imatura. Manaus : Editora Valer, 2008, TRACOL, Samuel; HOUTE, Arnaud-Dominique. "Aqui começa o Brasil": penal colonization, territorialization and border construction of the Oyapock river. 1853-1927 Vargas' project is summed up in a speech with the evocative title, "The Brazilian destiny of the Amazon", delivered on 31 January 1940 in Belém: "The facts and conquests of technology prove [...] that with our own example, how it is possible, on the banks of the great river, to implant a unique and singular civilization, rich in vital elements and capable of growing and prospering.
"However, a necessarily critical viewpoint imposes a single conclusion: the territorialization of the Amazon has contributed to its barbarization. If it is central to the national imagination, whose territory stretches from Oiapoque to Xuí, the French-Brazilian border is associated with the tenacious image of the "green hell". In France, the evocative power of the bagne makes the term synonymous with French Guiana. The prison experience does not only found a shameful territorial identity, based on the experience of suffering, but also of a state practice that has never become completely normalized. The interior of French Guiana remained under the direct administration of the central authority, without political and civic rights for the population, until 1969 under the colonial toponym of "territory of the Inini". At the same time, it is an under-administered state, which does not meet the needs of the communities. The historian then questions modernity: "why in such and such a time did the "moderns" try to make everyone modern, and why in such and such a different time they did not? " (COOPER, 2005, p.190). In short, the Amazon still appears to be a the transitory" 50 , the historian reveals chronologies and cartographies from the jumble of incomplete memories and hazardous reconstructions. He helps to make the territory intelligible to its inhabitants. It is surely a key for the affirmation of Amazonians by themselves, beyond national histories that place them in a de facto foreign situation. For them, as for the prisoners, and all the "fragile lives" 51 , the historian and his material, the archive, "deliver the unsaid" 52 . By formulating it differently, they give a voice to the voiceless.