MAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRESMAISON BEAULIEUAB ÉDITIONS · CUISINE & LETTRES“Origins of civil imprisonment for debt.”Prisons of Europe · Volume IV
Confined for twenty-two years for refusing to settle a disputed claim, Colonel James Swan defied his creditors until freedom itself struck him down in the heart of Paris.
One did not cross the threshold of the mansion on the Rue de Clichy as one fell beneath the dripping bolts of Bicêtre or into the subterranean pits of La Force. At Clichy, a special house of detention inaugurated under the Restoration to purge Sainte-Pélagie of its insolvent wretches, crime went clad in an English frock coat, silk stockings, and the scent of carnation. This was the realm of civil imprisonment—the contrainte par corps—a feudal relic codified by Napoleon that permitted any creditor to purchase the carcass of his debtor for the derisory cost of a monthly alimentary allowance. For forty-five francs a month, laid in advance upon the head concierge’s broad ledger desk, a vindictive banker kept his man under lock and key; let but a single day’s delay befall this consignment for bread and meat, and the latch sprang open upon the instant.
Behind the high walls bristling with the invisible bayonets of the Chaussée-d’Antin, the rattle of keys possessed a sinister softness. The prison registers recorded neither homicide nor sedition, but staggering cataracts of unpaid drafts, accommodation bills, and vanished mortgages. The concierge did not rifle pockets in search of a shiv; he weighed the fullness of purses. Through the waxed corridors and across the broad courtyard shaded by linden trees, one caught the rustle of financial gazettes, the clinking of silver services, and the buoyant laughter of diners. Yet beneath this good-natured air of an aristocratic gentlemen’s club, the cage remained unyielding. It was the prison of shattered vanities, the dead end of prodigals, where ruined princes rubbed shoulders with illustrious knaves beneath the mocking gaze of the turnkey.
“Civil arrest does not slay its man; it petrifies him in his impotence. The debtor ceases to belong to human society; he becomes the inert chattel of a financial vendetta.”
Amid this variegated menagerie reigned an absolute sovereign, a legendary patriarch whose very name sent a ripple of astonishment along the galleries: Colonel James Swan. An American hero of the War of Independence and an intrepid merchant whose vessels had once provisioned the National Convention, Swan possessed immense wealth. His estates in the United States spanned entire provinces, and his bills of exchange might have underwritten the national loan of a petty principality. Yet in 1808, a German merchant, abetted by obliging tribunals, claimed two million francs from him over a disputed maritime transaction. Swan, unwavering in his conviction of right, refused to surrender a single centime.
“To pay would be to confess myself a forger,” he swore, holding out his wrists to the bailiffs. “My creditors shall have nothing but my bones!”
Cast first into Sainte-Pélagie, then transferred to the debtors’ palace on the Rue de Clichy, he remained there for more than twenty full years. James Swan did not languish: he held court. He occupied a suite of three apartments appointed with uncommon opulence, hung with crimson damask and stocked with the rarest vintages of France. More delicious still: the Colonel had purchased the bourgeois mansion situated directly opposite the prison, across the cobbled street. There resided his wife and daughters. Every afternoon, the old man planted himself before the barred casement of his cell, gold lorgnette in hand, to salute his family leaning over their flower-strewn balcony—flouting royal justice with the stoic phlegm of a Boston pioneer.
Clichy watched the century parade past its gates. In the ground-floor salons, Swan kept an open table for transient guests, and what company! There sat the formidable Gabriel-Julien Ouvrard, the great contractor-general of the Empire, who, from the depths of his lockup, negotiated loans of fifty millions with European chanceries and sent tremors through the Paris Bourse by means of secret couriers bought at exorbitant prices. Ouvrard sipped the Colonel’s Madeira while at the pianoforte played the Prince of Kaunitz, cast into the place by the ruinous caprices of an Opera dancer.
One day the turnkeys booked Kallewig, known as “the handsome Swede,” an unrepentant seducer whose duels and gaming debts were the staple of the boulevards; the next, a self-styled Patriarch of Jerusalem, swathed in purple silk, blessed the thin broth of the destitute before sitting down to a game of piquet with bankrupt fencing masters. At night, when the heavy deadbolts dropped into place along the landings, Clichy murmured with mercantile intrigues and stifled sobs. For while nabobs feasted upon their insolvency, obscure shopkeepers, clapped in irons for three hundred miserable francs by the malice of a neighborhood usurer, wasted away in despair, far from their hungry children.
On the first of every month, the jailers waited for the slip of Swan’s creditor. But the German was unflagging. The forty-five francs for sustenance dropped into the prison’s purse with the punctuality of a funeral clock. Swan could have signed a draft and walked out within the quarter-hour; he chose instead to grind down his adversary with iron tenacity, declaring that he would leave Clichy only through the grand portals, triumphant, and without yielding a farthing.
History itself took upon its shoulders the task of shattering the deadlock that gold could not budge. In July 1830, the cannon of Charles X thundered over Paris. The Revolution of the Three Glorious Days set the Faubourg Saint-Honoré ablaze, and barricades rose to the foot of the Rue de Clichy. On the twenty-ninth of July, an armed populace, drunk on gunpowder and republican fervor, marched upon the debtors’ prison. The carriage gates splintered under the axes of the insurgents; the intake ledgers were shredded, scattered to the winds, and trampled beneath boots amid roaring cheers.
“You are free!” shouted the armed students to the bewildered captives. “Tyranny is dead! Long live Liberty!”
Amid the uproar, James Swan refused to flee like a common culprit. He waited until the governor of the prison delivered him a formal discharge drawn up in due and proper form. Then, the old man of seventy-six years, leaning upon his jasper-pommeled cane, crossed the accursed threshold he had not trodden for twenty-two years, eight months, and twenty-three days. Around him, the world had changed its age: Napoleon had died in irons, two Bourbon kings had fled, and steam was transforming the face of the earth.
Swan took a few tottering steps upon the warm stones of the Rue de Clichy. He drew a deep breath of the unbarred air, lifted his eyes toward the midday sun, and signaled across the way to the mansion where his family had waited through so many winters. Suddenly, his gloved hand clutched at his heart. His knees buckled. The free air, after two decades of voluntary captivity, struck him down with the violence of a poisoned blade. The Colonel collapsed upon the boulevard pavement, felled by a fulminating apoplexy only hours after his release. Pride had kept him alive in chains; the very first breath of freedom had snatched away his life.