The lecture concludes with a study of two examples of reconciliation and reparation. The first is the unexpected cooperation of the prisoners of Sainte-Pélagie with the administration, whether prison or prefecture. The Memoirs of Henri Gisquet, Prefect of Police of Paris under the July regime, in office from October 1831 to September 1836, are illuminating in this respect. Written during a politically turbulent period, marked by both republican and legitimist insurrections, a series of attacks, a cholera epidemic and a sharp upsurge in repression, they bear witness to the prefect's fairly flexible policy towards political prisoners guilty of press offenses. The inmates of Sainte-Pélagie, as long as they put on a good show, were given preferential treatment, which displeased the prison inspector Moreau-Christophe: several of them were able to commute their sentence to a stay in a nursing home, and some were granted the right to leave on a promise of honor, including to go to shows. In 1832, Gisquet offered Chateaubriand, who had just been charged with plotting against state security for assisting the Duchesse de Berry, to spend his nights of incarceration in his own apartment. At a time of great chaos, Chateaubriand even indulged in the thought of a romance with the prefect's daughter; in any case, it was at the Quai des Orfèvres that he paradoxically found a haven of peace.
The second figure is that of a warrior's rest, the truce from literary hostilities that imprisonment at Sainte-Pélagie paradoxically offers. It's what we might call theotium carcéral. Just after the revolution of 1830, a new wing of Sainte-Pélagie was opened, reserved for press offenses: this was the "Pavillon des Princes", intended for this aristocracy of writers, legitimists and above all republicans, who found here the opportunity for a new sociability - and even a new life. Sainte-Pélagie is an authentic realization of the "Republic of Letters". Paul-Louis Courier, who in 1821 was among the first to be indicted under the 1819 law, says he is very happy there, and even receives more visits than he would like. Béranger found the time to write many poems. Étienne de Jouy, author of l'Hermite de la Chaussée d'Antin, stayed there with his friend Antoine Jay, after appearing to praise the regicides in their Biographie nouvelle des contemporains; he said he felt much freer at Sainte-Pélagie than the king on his throne. Jay, in such a spiritual exercise, devotes himself to reading Epictetus. The poet Barthélémy, in the preface to a collection of poems written in prison, makes Sainte-Pélagie the place of all literature. His poems, often built around the figure of consolation or that of Suave mari magno, are representative of these Sainte-Pélagie narratives, which almost constitute a literary genre. Sosthène de la Rochefoucauld delights in describing the displacement of all his furniture in the cell he occupies. Proudhon, who was incarcerated for three years from 1849, describes the comfort of his stay, the view of the Pitié hospital and the Jardin des Plantes. He moved his wife into the building opposite the prison, and was almost afraid that the revolution he hoped for would succeed too quickly, because it would take him out of his asylum too soon. Chateaubriand, who spends his days in prison, finds political and poetic inspiration there. He devotes himself to Latin verses, and projects onto the prison the ideal of the monastic cell that pervades the writing of the Mémoires d'outre-tombe, and which should make writing possible. When Chateaubriand reads Le Tasse, a Louis-Auguste Martin, stenographer to the National Assembly, poet and photographer, indicted in 1857 because the irony of his Vraiset faux catholiques was not understood by his judges, reads Silvio Pellico. He describes Sainte-Pélagie as a place of true luxury, and spends the six months of his imprisonment at the window, observing, like Baudelaire - sentenced the same year and by the same Sixth Correctional Chamber - the daily occupations of his opposite numbers.
All the tropes encountered throughout the lecture delineate a coherent period: that of 1820-1870, which is the golden age of the ragpicker so closely resembling the fighting writer, but which is more precisely that of 1819-1881, demarcated by two press laws, one of which defines the notion of defamation, the other the foundations of our contemporary system. Between these two milestones lies the story of a literary war that is also the story of a certain powerlessness of the State to exercise the monopoly of legitimate violence.
