Salubrité, sociabilité ou exemplarité ? Les enjeux de l’infrastructure carcérale dans le Paris des Lumières

• Main Author: Sophie Abdela
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: ENS Éditions 2018-12-01
• Series: Tracés
• Subjects: Paris; prisons; infrastructure; Enlightenment; city; infrastructures
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/traces/8179

In the 18th century, Paris’ prison infrastructure is encompassed in the Enlightenment which seeks to sanitize the capital. Part of the urban equipment, the gaol appears as a proper pustule which needs to be repelled in order to protect the city. This is all the more necessary since there exists, between prisons and residents, a disturbing proximity due to the buildings’ permeability and close vicinity. This proximity, turned into promiscuity, is troublesome. Despite that, the prisons stay in place because these sanitary and security considerations oppose social, financial and penal issues which tend to make the prison infrastructure a fundamentally urban phenomenon. All at once a material, social, politic and penal reality, prison architecture becomes a crossroads: under its apparent immobility, Paris is on the move.