This terrific book extends well beyond its apparent subject: late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French colonial Guiana. Spieler does not neglect the local context of this distant, sad, and seemingly anomalous French imperial outpost on the South American coast, but her true subject is more expansive, and also more elusive, because she argues that French Guiana, rather than being the mythical and abandoned wilderness of imperial and anthropological fantasy, was a land constantly made and unmade by law. In its determined effort to construct a space of detention for deported political enemies, convicts, vagabonds, freed slaves, and Maroons, France itself invested heavily in this outpost by way of the resources of revolutionary legal doctrine, which Spieler takes apart and puts together again in a brilliant and cogent analysis.

How does a nation create a legal void by means of law? Spieler's introduction takes the measure of the usual suspects—Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Carl Schmitt, and Georgio Agamben—only to find that all are inadequate to account for the particularities of French Guiana's “double identity as a land of exile and a land of slavery and emancipation” (6). It was this duality that, Spieler argues, permitted law to intervene so pervasively in the fabric of French imperial life. She insists that the plight of refugees, slaves, and criminals did not derive from their consignment to a putative state of nature, but rather from their integration into legally structured spaces of exile, limbo, and incapacitation. And she posits that the effort to distinguish between the state of exception and the rule of law in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history is futile, because exception and rule merged at every moment (a development that the Italian political theorist Georgio Agamben, in another work not cited here, State of Exception, locates in twentieth-century European and American history).

However, whether the prison is inside or outside the normal order, or whether a discrete and separate “normal order” exists in the first place, are questions that can only be answered in light of concrete historical inquiries. It is to Spieler's great credit that she manages to reconstruct from the available archival fragments a remarkably rich and fascinating story of a colony's contingent evolution toward an end that was never foreordained. That end is the colonial penitentiary state, which Spieler sees as completely consolidated by the mid-1860s. The process begins with the use of deportation as a substitute for the violence of the French revolutionary Terror in the later 1790s. The treatment of revolutionary-era political enemies in turn became the model for the deportation of criminals housed in and released from the nation's naval prisons. The ex-convict menaced French society of the early nineteenth-century as no other figure and, during that period, became subject to an infinitely mobile “surveillance of the high police” that crossed the Atlantic and effectively constituted the new, purely legal boundaries of an otherwise unbounded French Guiana.

There, the ex-convicts were joined by larger numbers of convicts still serving terms of hard labor and a very small number of French women. The techniques of legal debilitation and surveillance that trailed these groups at every step were, for their part, extended even further to encompass persons already living in the colony. The fate of the emancipated slave after the (second) French abolition of 1848 was hijacked by the colonial penitentiary project. During the 1850s, plans to isolate prisoners and liberated felons from local free society were turned against the freed slaves themselves, reducing the latter to a state of de facto servitude and exposing a neighboring Maroon community to systematic violence. Colonial administrators ruling by decree merged the state of siege with techniques borrowed from colonial military warfare in Algeria. The convict system came to “devour” French Guiana, such that, by the 1860s, one could no longer speak of a division between the “penal” and “normal” colonies (207, 214).

Spieler unfolds this disarming analysis in painstaking, meticulous writing that she has clearly labored over with great care and insight. To my mind, a few questions remain. First, it is worth knowing more about the circumstances that gave the French navy jurisdiction over both colonialism/slavery and the punishment/surveillance of infamous criminals. Second, the relationship between the punishment of criminals (and ex-convicts) and the discipline of slaves (and freed persons) has a much larger and longer trajectory in Western history, one that Spieler only gestures at theoretically in her introduction. Third, this book's integration of French and colonial history, against the backdrop of an unrelenting marginalization and degradation of the ex-convict, poses the question of why modern French metropolitan criminal justice moved in a quite different direction: toward a recognition of the dignity of the criminal. These questions notwithstanding, this is a superlative study that students of European and Atlantic legal history and criminal justice will want to read.